Jennifer Howard, Archive Watch: Bohemian Rhapsody, Wired Campus, January 20, 2009. Interview with Edward Whitley, editorial director of The Vault at Pfaff’s, an OA "archive of art and literature by New York's nineteenth-century Bohemians".
... Q. Who uses the site? How much traffic does it get?
A. In 2008 we had over 114,000 visits to the site by over 39,000 unique visitors. As far as we can tell, it’s mostly scholars and students who are visiting the site, but we also hear from people outside of academia who stumble onto the site out of an interest in some aspect of American history and they end up falling in love with the Pfaffians. ...
Q. How does being involved in this kind of work affect a scholar’s chances for tenure and promotion?
A. When I started this project as an untenured assistant professor during my first year of employment, I vowed that I wouldn’t let myself become a test case for whether or not someone could get tenure based solely on digital scholarship. I’ve kept that promise over the past five years, and as tenure looms on the horizon I’m grateful that I’ve put the Vault at Pfaff’s aside often enough to work on publishing in traditional venues. Having said that, I can’t help but wonder how much further along I could be with this project if I’d dedicated myself to it 100 percent. ...
Q. How do you sustain the project?
A. Without the institutional support that Lehigh University has provided through the Digital Scholarship Center, this project would never have gotten off the ground. A strong institutional commitment to digital scholarship is absolutely essential to the survival of projects like this. Lehigh has also been very generous in providing additional funds to pay research assistants, and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation gave us a grant a while back that really allowed us to get the bulk of the work done. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 1/22/2009 04:52:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
