A much-needed boost to digital scholarship is in the works at University of Michigan Press, which announced this week that it will be receiving a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a durable, open-source platform for digital companions to printed publications. From the Michigan press release:

The grant will fund an effort to meet the growing needs of authors to durably connect their publications to related datasets, interactive information, video and other non-text based online content. The ultimate goal is to create a shareable, open-source solution for born-digital complementary monograph materials as well as a working model that maximizes the publishing strengths of university presses and the preservation expertise of libraries.

Authors Alliance applauds this effort and its promise for preserving the kinds of digitally-enabled scholarship many of our members create.

Scholarship should be lasting, but the web can be all too transient. To take one common example, citations to web-based resources run the risk of pointing to pages that have moved, changed, or are simply no longer there. Perma.cc is one approach to solving the citation problem, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the long-term preservation of “born-digital” scholarship.

Companion sites allow authors to provide complementary resources that work best off the page. Where datasets and “non-text based online content” are integral to a text, we need to make sure that they too are preserved and kept accessible. This newest effort from the University of Michigan Press is an admirable step in that direction.

Source: Michigan News