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Category: Project

Description: In this session, representatives from three university presses will discuss research and development projects underway that will advance the context and utility of scholarly ebooks and address the challenges for exploiting the powerful affordances of long-form digital scholarship, including discoverability and accessibility, the ebook experience for end users, and the socialization of scholarship. Lever Press is a joint initiative between a group of liberal arts colleges aligned with the Oberlin Group, Amherst College Press and Michigan Publishing. It has committed to creating publications that are digitally native, aligned with the mission and ethos of liberal arts colleges, and platinum open access and is now implementing that vision. New York University’s Enhanced Networked Monographs project will enable NYU to enrich a corpus of scholarly monographs with semantic tags of critical concepts, names, and geographic locations, resulting in a rich index across the corpus. In addition, NYU will develop a publication interface that exposes the full texts and semantic tags for discovery on the open web. The interface will allow readers to navigate across the semantic topics and to annotate the books, and will enable publishers to enrich the texts with archival material in sustainable ways. MUSE Open is an initiative of Project MUSE, a leading provider of digital humanities and social science content for the scholarly community. Project MUSE currently delivers 652 journals and 44,000 books from 258 not-for-profit publishers. MUSE Open will focus on deploying a scalable solution for the ingestion and conversion of EPUB3 book files to HTML5 + RDFa, defining client-desirable features and functionality for HTML books, and developing a robust cost-recovery model for hosting open access monographs on the MUSE platform. MUSE Open and NYU’s Enhanced Network Monographs initiative are funded by generous support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.