2009 Presentations (Communicative Events)

Modeling Press-Library Collaboration in the Creation of an Online Book

Kennison, Rebecca R.

Columbia’s Center for Digital Research and Scholarship (CDRS) and Fordham University Press (FUP) have combined forces in a library-press partnership to create online a book authored by Columbia anthropology professor Neni Panourgiá entitled Dangerous Citizens: The Greek Left and the Terror of the State. The print book was published by FUP in August. Its online sibling – sharing parentage and intellectual DNA, but quite different in appearance – launches in December, designed and hosted (at http://dangerouscitizens.columbia.edu) by CDRS. Our collaboration offers a useful model for how such partnerships can succeed, by leveraging the expertise and creativity of two groups both fully devoted to bringing the author’s scholarly vision to life, one as her publisher and the other as an organization whose mission it is to serve the digital needs of the Columbia faculty. Owing to this shared commitment to the author, we have found this model of collaboration to open up opportunities both for distributing the burden and participating together in the creation of this work in ways that might not otherwise exist within an intra-institutional arrangement, as is more usual in press-library partnerships. This presentation outlines the divisions of labor and joint efforts that took full advantage of the combined strengths of our teams and the ongoing communication necessary to make such a collaboration work smoothly, and it describes the challenges that faced both our teams in bringing to life in two distinct forms the vision the author had for her project. The presentation concludes with a demonstration of the newly launched online book, showing how it is dramatically different from being merely the book online, and will discuss the features we will be rolling out in the next months as the online book continues to develop through additional functionality, content modifications, and user contributions.