0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 14/15)

In addition to building recognition for the name Rotunda, we also, perhaps instinctively as publishers, have insisted on good design in the presentation of our digital collections. In the same way that appropriate typography and page layout is essential in the presentation of information in print format, accomplished design is crucial for online resources. Web designers need to blend graphic design with intuitive navigation to achieve “usability.” The design of Rotunda websites has been an iterative process that has often responded to usability studies as well as responses from reviewers and individual customers, who include librarians, scholars, and students. The Rotunda “look” has been an important part of the project’s success.

Importance of collections

We readily adapted to the idea of “collections” which is congruent with book publishers’ tradition of building lists in given subject areas. The virtue of collections is that one publication supports another in marketing. Rotunda offers all its publications for sale separately but gives special discounts for the complete collections. In the digital environment, projects covering a similar time period can also support each other through new ways of searching and thus add real value for the user. In the American Founding Era collection, for example, users can search by author or recipient, giving a date range. They can also choose whether to search the documents, the notes, or both, and can specify language. This sophisticated searching is made possible by the proprietary software and provides a great tool for the editors of the ongoing editions and other researchers of the period.

One problem with collections is that we need to plan carefully before starting a new one. It is not desirable to take on too many stand-alone publications that cannot form part of a collection. The reception of Rotunda has been most encouraging, but we also see that there is a need for more publishers, with different subject interests, to develop other scholarly collections.

Digital format

From the beginning, UVa Press expected to use Extensible Markup Language (XML) markup in all its electronic publications rather than the more commonly used PDF files with images of pages and limited search capacity. For many uses, PDF is perfectly acceptable, but for complex literary editions and important documentary editions, we believed that the XML approach was essential. Publishers that adopt XML must spend more time analyzing the structure of documents and providing guidance to vendors to mark them up correctly. This work then has to be vetted by the publisher’s staff and sometimes by the academic editors to be sure that the integrity of the original editions is maintained. As mentioned earlier, the National Archives’ report, The Founders Online, indicated that the agency considered fulfilling Congress’s mandate to put the Founding Fathers Papers online by simply mounting PDFs: “The first option would be to have the Government scan the completed volumes and publish them online directly.” Fortunately, their recommendation was otherwise: “The second option, which we recommend, is to help accelerate existing online publication efforts.”