0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint

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What role might university presses play with regard to online scholarly editions in an age of digital possibilities? That is a question that the University of Virginia Press has been seeking to answer over the past decade. I’d like to share some of the things we have learned as we have developed our digital imprint, Rotunda, and discuss how we are addressing the issue of sustainability. In the past eight years, Rotunda has published a number of major digital editions but at this point is probably best known for its cross-searchable collection of American Founding Era documentary editions, a collection that we started in 2004 and that now contains over 60,000 documents. The importance to the nation of the papers of the Founding Fathers has put a special responsibility on us to find ways to “cherish and preserve” these editions as we add new volumes to the digital collection for years to come. We confront the implications of perpetual stewardship as we look to Rotunda’s future.

Rotunda’s history

University presses have well-established programs for publishing electronic journals and are rapidly learning how to create electronic versions of their books for sale through various vendors and aggregators. Yet few have been able to consider publishing original works in digital form. The reasons for this have been primarily economic. University presses seldom have the capital to invest in new programs or to undertake experimental work. Unless they publish journals, they are unlikely to have programmers or other technical experts on staff.

In 2001, the University of Virginia Press was fortunate to be given the opportunity to become a publisher of original digital projects when it received substantial funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Virginia to create an electronic imprint. The charge to the imprint was to consider the benefits and obstacles of publishing original digital works in the humanities and social sciences and to find ways to make such a publishing program sustainable. This development coincided with new interest in the academy in taking original digital projects into account in tenure and promotion decisions.

The idea for a university press digital imprint at Virginia came from John Unsworth, the director of the Institute for Advanced Technology (IATH) at the University of Virginia, in collaboration with Nancy Essig, my predecessor as director of the UVa Press. Since IATH was founded in 1992, John Unsworth had been working with faculty on many innovative digital projects. These were usually hosted by IATH and their long-term future was always a question. He saw a role for a scholarly publisher to help evaluate the projects, give them the imprimatur of a university press, provide traditional publishing services, and help them achieve sustainability. Unsworth and Essig submitted a proposal to the Mellon Foundation to create a digital imprint at the UVa Press with the intention of publishing ten born-digital projects in the first two years. As they stated the problem, “Scholars are producing originally digital publications with increasing frequency. These are not E-books, nor digital derivatives of print publications, and because they don’t fit the traditional production, distribution, or economic practices of scholarly publishing, they pose a new challenge. Moreover, because scholarly presses are not well capitalized, they are not in a position to experiment while continuing full book-publishing programs. As a result, very few presses have any experience in publishing originally digital scholarship; there is very little information to help presses decide when or how to get involved; and most originally digital scholarship is produced without the benefit of the editorial, design, marketing, and cost-recovery services that a press can offer.” The Foundation awarded a generous grant that was matched by the President’s office of the University of Virginia. This was a rare instance of a university investing in an experimental program at its university press. Much credit must also be given to the University for its history of supporting the development of digital humanities. IATH was a pioneer of such digital humanities projects as the Rossetti Archive, developed by Jerome McGann, one of the cofounders of IATH. The University of Virginia Library developed the E-text center to provide public domain materials free online, long before the Google book project was started. The University of Virginia’s history as a leader in digital humanities lent credibility to the Press’s initial application to the Mellon Foundation.