Changing the face of scholarly information provision: a case study of developing and launching JISC eCollections

Milloy, Caren

doi:10.1629/2048-7754.25.1.74

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“…As Caren Milloy (the director of licensing since 2020) described it, this is 'a community-owned content service developed to protect and preserve existing content investments by offering an alternative to commercial providers. It brings access fees within the control of the community, in terms of ring-fenced reinvestment and moderation of increases' (Milloy, 2012). A particular source of frustration in UK libraries is the pricing structure of digital collections.…”

Section: Old Books and Digital Publishingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Gregg

2020

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with his point that the term 'texts' should go beyond the printed text to encompass the very broadest set of human communication media and evenmost vital for us -'computer-stored information'; there is, he argues, 'no evading the challenge which those new forms have created' (McKenzie, 1999: 13). The discipline of bibliography 'studies texts as recorded forms, and the processes of their transmission, including their production and reception' (12). Perhaps the strongest argument for my history is that a 'sociology of texts' should allow 'us to describe not only the technical but the social processes of their transmission', and it 'directs us to consider the human motives and interactions which texts involve at every stage of their production, transmission, and consumption. It alerts us to the role of institutions, and their own complex structures, in affecting the forms of social discourse, past and present' (McKenzie, 1999: 13, 15). Sociocultural forces, institutions, technology, and human agency all play their part in this history.Eighteenth Century Collections Onlineor any digital entityis not a static or an unchanging entity: it has a history. The rapidity with which commercial publishing technology supersedes older versions of itself has meant that some circumstances of its development are now obscure and others are irrecoverable. Tellingly, a part of ECCO will become invisible from 2020 when its original interface is scheduled to be turned off: it will literally be history. So this book is partly an act of recovery. The third chapter, 'Beginnings', turns to the development of ECCO itself. In the first section, I examine the immediate contexts that shaped how ECCO was to work and to be sold. It was decisively influenced by the downward movement of the academic publishing market and the emerging so-called disruptive technologies in the 1990s (Bower & Christensen, 1995). I focus on the techno-commercial choices facing Gale by illustrating contemporary digital resources created by two of its key commercial competitors in academic publishing of the time: Chadwyck-Healey and ProQuest. In addition, some aspects of how ECCO works 'under the hood' arein common with many digital productssimply invisible to the public. The chapter goes on to explain Gale's digitisation of the microfilm collection, discussing the problems created by the use of optical character recognition (OCR) software to

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Section: Old Books and Digital Publishingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Gregg

2020

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Changing the face of scholarly information provision: a case study of developing and launching JISC eCollections

Cited by 1 publication

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Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

Old Books and Digital Publishing: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online

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