(On reflecting on the title of this entry, and whether “fray” was appropriate, perhaps I should also qualify the term as a “friendly” skirmish, contest, or quarrel…)
Ed, George, and I spent the morning in a meeting discussing Shelf2Life, a project encompassing the digitization of public domain texts, distribution of e-versions of the texts to various online vendors, and the ability to print these works on demand at the point-of-sale, at BCR. Several of our members are participating in the initiative, while others are generally interested.
We’ve begun to explore whether there is a consortial interest, as well as how to offer long-term digital archiving of the e-texts, if our members desire. Local access to and distribution of the e-texts is tied up in contracts and business models, but at the very least, we should be able to provide tiers of secure preservation services for the e-texts, and auto-loading workflows not unlike our developing OA ProQuest ETDs auto-load service. There are a lot of stakeholders involved in the Shelf2Life project, not to mention a heck of a lot of ISBNs – for the e-text, for the hard cover, for the soft cover, for the online edition, etc. There are also multiple sources of metadata, multiple formats, and many questions still to be answered regarding server and system security from the prospective of a profit-oriented vendor. The meeting – and attendees – were upbeat and positive, while we hammered out what we all thought we needed to know more about…
There is some homework, certainly future meetings, and some continued testing…but, all in all, it appears to be an interesting project. Now, I just have to lobby for the members’ royalties from the sale of these works to be dedicated to the on-going storage and preservation costs of these texts…Another “fray” to be sure!
