Web Seminars Contributed by EDUCAUSE, Digital Collections, and Electronic Publishing

The Gutenberg-e project was created as a bold experiment to explore whether peer-reviewed, born-digital monographs would alter the way historical scholarship is presented, whether scholars would receive the same professional credit for these publications as they would from work published in print, and whether the project would enable the publication of monographs that would otherwise be turned down for financial reasons by university presses. The project has a history that includes both exciting breakthroughs and significant challenges. A number of the authors have created completely new models of collaboration in the scholarly communication process as well as new models of historical scholarship and narrative. We have come to understand that e-books require a significant level of investment in both editorial and technical staff time in order to create publications that reach their full potential as works of digital scholarship. We have also learned that integrating and sustaining this work within a collaborative publishing, library, and technology organization presents significant challenges and great opportunities.

The collective expertise of digital libraries in making available the diverse literatures of science and artistic expression, in concert with the increasing sophistication of commercial partners and the development of distributed, interactive forms of publishing, require libraries to chart the engineering of new architectures for teaching, learning, and research. Digital libraries must work to forge the new collaborations required to enable and build these services.