tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8873082787233864692011-08-01T12:25:04.053-05:00personal views on scholarly communication, and other such things . . .Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.comBlogger181100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-59859580058966216132011-05-10T07:56:00.000-05:002011-05-10T07:56:06.283-05:00

The workshops have started for the "Library Publishing Services: Strategies for Success" project, supported by a collaborative planning grant from IMLS. Three workshops are being held in May 2011 at each of the collaborating institutions' campuses. The first took place last week (May 4-6) at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, the second will be this week (May 11-13) at the University of Utah in Salt Lake

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-84926875253341668702010-02-06T13:33:00.001-05:002010-02-06T13:35:18.064-05:00

A frightening amount of work has gone in the January 2010 publication by Diane Harley and her colleagues of "Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines." The field is fortunate indeed that one of her case studies (on itself 134 pages long, and this is one of seven, remember!) is of archaeology, and she has covered a

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-43820227292785060752010-01-03T19:31:00.005-05:002010-01-03T21:31:53.568-05:00

As we turn the corner on a decade of investment in digital repositories, strategies for making what many critics have regarded as white elephants "work" are finally emerging. Dorothea Salo's beautifully titled article "Innkeeper at the Roach Motel" (Library Trends, 57.2, 2008) defined the problem that many libraries faced in the first decade of their existence -- that the IRs that were meant to

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-9930049350506820332009-04-18T11:46:00.005-05:002009-04-18T12:45:14.302-05:00

I was flattered to be invited last Thursday to be a panelist at the sixth Scholarly Information Symposium organized by Drexel University Libraries. Under the title of "For What It's Worth," the seminar started with the assumption that since scholarly information is not free to produce, it is incumbent on all of those involved in the information supply chain to understand the costs involved . . .

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-81177198434796779712009-04-08T20:23:00.006-05:002009-04-09T07:48:38.454-05:00

Who would have thought, entering the elegant Upper East Side townhouse, that a gang of revolutionary conspirators lived here? And yet, in a series of recent announcements, the Mellon Foundation's program for scholarly communication has again proved that it has (in the words of a senior academic) got "sans culottes" tendencies.Two of the funding announcements are archaeological projects. The

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-64894901209969117832009-04-04T16:51:00.003-05:002009-04-04T18:44:06.893-05:00

Transformational Times, a recent report from the Association of Research Libraries, provides an "environmental scan" of (among other things) trends in scholarly communication, as seen from the perspective of North America's research libraries. Noting that "scholarly communication practices have now fully entered a phase of near-constant change," the authors predict that the "movement away from

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-66539130731343847862009-03-21T15:43:00.009-05:002009-03-21T20:57:16.971-05:00

I am excited to be one of the co-authors of an upcoming article about the Shala Valley Project (SVP), the interdisciplinary expedition to Northern Albania directed by Mike Galaty of Millsaps College, that I was privileged to be involved with from 2004-2007. Any publication is cool, but I have a feeling that this one is going to be particularly fun because Mike and the rest of my colleagues are

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-44794024756909566032008-08-30T14:55:00.005-05:002008-08-30T16:01:45.742-05:00

A humanities publisher is always happy to be recognized by the STM world, especially a giant like Elsevier, so it is delightful to receive a message addressed to the Editor of Hesperia telling us that "in recognition of the quality and relevance of your journal to the scientific community, we are pleased to inform you that the publication listed above has been selected to be covered for indexing

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-22048106253065224212008-04-05T14:44:00.007-05:002008-04-05T16:38:21.903-05:00

Trouble is brewing in the arcane world of humanities bibliometrics, and it looks as if a major debate on the measurement of what constitutes "quality" in scholarship in fields such as archaeology and classical studies is about to begin.The catalyst for this is a European Science Foundation initiative to compile a European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), defined (in its first iteration)

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-61352756826202123462008-04-05T13:56:00.002-05:002008-04-05T14:05:08.081-05:00

I was extremely flattered and amused last week to have stimulated a debate about ecology through my rather glib identification of some of the giants in our field of broader Mediterranean archaeology (Hodder, Davis, Joukowsky, Rose) as "grey panthers," who are confident enough of their positions to take the risk of sharing data.I think that the distinguished colleagues who have recently identified

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-78127518780516639042008-04-01T20:53:00.005-05:002008-04-01T22:31:31.375-05:00

Sebastian Heath's comments on my last post, where I made some rather self-important statements about the problems of linking data and publication, are (as one would expect) thoughtful and stimulating.Sebs is right to pick me up on my glib statement that "nobody wants to share their data," and he presents some good examples of admirable projects that are taking a lead in being transparent and

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-11422391692900713122008-03-30T12:24:00.011-05:002008-03-31T18:28:14.301-05:00

In Scholarship in the Digital Age (2007), Christine Borgman writes that "scholarly publications tell the story of data, regardless of whether those data are biological specimens, ecological sensor data, answers to interview questions, potshards found in an archaeological sites, or themes in fourteenth-century manuscripts. The story may be lost when the data and the publications are separated.

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-47820339420698872482008-03-06T20:00:00.003-05:002008-03-30T15:16:31.614-05:00

There follows the text of a presentation I gave at the Mellon Foundation's All-Projects, Archaeology, meeting held in New York in March 2008. A version with pictures can be found on the meeting's website.The project we will be talking about is somewhat different from the other presentations today in that our focus is on an institution rather than a particular work of electronic scholarship.

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-46961758098495897862007-10-27T09:52:00.000-05:002007-10-27T09:58:57.233-05:00

The exponential growth in digital scholarship is driving the creation of more and more institutional and disciplinary repositories. Publishers are rarely involved in the formative stages of developing these projects, but it is increasingly clear that our skills are needed. A forthcoming SSP seminar explores recent developments in the repository movement, and shows how some innovative publishers

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-36069362322710773172007-01-21T14:45:00.000-05:002007-01-21T16:04:24.021-05:00

The suggestion that it may be OK for us to be "pervy for paper," remaining unduly wedded to the destruction of trees in an age of almost infinite electronic storage capacity and instantaneous internet availability, came from Cory Doctorow, one of the stellar collection of speakers at the "UnBound" conference last Thursday. Initiated and sponsored by Google, and subtitled "Advancing Book

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-48959914783181997592007-01-21T12:49:00.000-05:002007-01-21T14:10:47.666-05:00

The announcement on Friday, January 19, 2007 that JSTOR is planning to migrate its wonderful archive of scholarly content to the Atypon platform is probably good news for the scholarly world in general, and humanities and social sciences in particular. Although I haven't heard many complaints at all, on any topic, from JSTOR users, the ones I have heard have been about technical glitches in the

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-7261875270237121982006-09-07T23:41:00.000-05:002007-01-20T23:49:08.542-05:00

[This is the text of a talk I gave at the Society for Scholarly Publishing Top Management Round Table, held in Philadelphia on September 7, 2006. It seemed to be well-received, and speakers throughout the rest of the day referred back to the (not original) concept that the functions of Registration, Certification, Dissemination, and Archiving are key distinguishing features of the act of

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-887308278723386469.post-54408851282624164132006-08-16T20:50:00.000-05:002007-01-20T23:03:41.465-05:00

[The following is the Executive Summary for an abbreviated version of a report I have just finished revising. It is based on the research I did for my MBA dissertation submitted to Oxford Brookes University at the end of 2005. My topic was initially a marketing one, but the more I talked with the publishers working in the UK cultural heritage sector, the more interested I became in the

Charles Watkinsonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00847936594091536563noreply@blogger.com1