Noted by James J. O'Donnell, University of Pennsylvania
The near-annual symposia on the present and future of electronic scholarly publishing, co-sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and the American Association of University Presses, are emerging as a well-frequented and influential marketplace for ideas in a rapidly changing environment. The proceedings of the Nov. 1992 symposium were printed and found an audience; those of the 1993 symposium are now available three months after the event itself, still timely and refreshing.
The theme is pragmatic. What is happening, what will happen next. There is particular interest for scholars in our traditional disciplines here, signaled by a Kelmscott Chaucer illustration on the cover, alluding to the presentation by Mary Wack of her rivetingly successful Chaucer image/text database project. Keven Kiernan similarly displays Beowulf MSS, and the present writer found that he (miraculously) had a few opinions left to share on historical issues illuminating the present day.
But the range of topics is broad: discussion of copyright issues from one university press publisher, economic analysis from another, discussion of the nitty-gritty of "going electronic" by the publisher of Encyclopedia Britannica (due out shortly with a networked text-only EB for campus use), and descriptions of numerous current experiments. (The project MUSE journals enterprise at Johns Hopkins, for example, is described here; for those with Mosaic access, http://muse.mse.jhu.edu/ takes you to a serious attempt at putting full text of three JHU-published journals, with search capacities, on the network along with images.
The book is worth a detour for many, but it is enhanced by electronic availability of parts. If you gopher to arl.cni.org, you may inspect the following items: a detailed summary (also in the printed book) of the proceedings of the whole symposium, the table of contents of the printed book, two of the keynote papers (one by the present writer, the other by cyberpunk sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling), and as a bonus the full text of Sterling's entertaining study of real life crime, punishment, and other misadventures in cyberspace, published by Bantam as "The Hacker Crackdown".
A USNews cover story a few weeks ago quoted one pundit saying that story a few months ago the words of one pundit opining that "For many people, the network revolution has already happened." 'Tis true, and this is one good snapshot, addressing the intellectual and institutional concerns of the academic, of what it has done and what it will do. Traditional publishing is in deep trouble; alternatives loom, but what we will make of them is far from clear.