Co-authored by a team of ten archivists and curators from the Beinecke, the Bodleian, the British Library, the Harry Ransom Center, Emory’s Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, and the Rubenstein Library at Duke, the report is the outcome of a series of conversations about how born-digital materials are acquired and transferred to archival repositories.

A draft of Born Digital has been published with MediaCommons Press, an innovative online publisher that allows readers to offer feedback via an easy-to-use commenting interface, and is currently open for comment.

The main body of the report surveys the primary issues and concerns related to born-digital acquisitions and is intended for a broad audience with varying levels of interest and expertise, including donors, dealers, and archival repositories, as well as scholars, students, and researchers. Appendices provide information about how to prepare for the unexpected and possible staffing costs, as well as ready-to-use checklists that incorporate recommendations from throughout the report. These recommendations are not meant to be universal and do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the authors’ institutions. Rather, they offer broad, useful guidance for donors, dealers, and repository staff involved in the acquisition or transfer of born-digital materials.

The report’s authors encourage archivists, curators, manuscript dealers, writers, scholars, students, and other custodians of archival materials to read the report, offer feedback, and take part in a discussion with the larger community of people concerned about the acquisition and preservation of born-digital materials. Your comments and suggestions will provide an important level of peer review as the report’s authors continue revising and preparing Born Digital for final publication.

“Fit for Purpose” was developed by a team that includes Mike Furlough (Penn State), Ted Fons (OCLC), Elizabeth Kirk (Dartmouth), Michele Reid (North Dakota State), and Carol Hunter (University of North Carolina). Noted consultant Judy Luther serves as an advisor to the project.

MediaCommons Press, CLIR, and the project team hope that readers will engage in a dialogue with the authors and their colleagues about the recommendations and their related experiences.

Jason is releasing the text chapter by chapter, with each new installment due every week or two. The book is under contract to NYU Press, but this draft manuscript and its surrounding discussion will remain on MediaCommons Press, even after the book has been published.

We hope that you will read along as Jason publishes his chapters and contribute to the discussion of this exciting volume!

Thanks to the support of Monica McCormick, Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at NYU, the AAUP task force has not only graciously agreed to but enthusiastically supported this discussion. Please come join us, and help MediaCommons and the AAUP together foster the kinds of communication that will support new modes of experimentation in scholarly publishing.

The essays cover a range of interesting subjects: a film about a Northern Ireland prison adaptation of Macbeth; Othello in 1903 Japan; Merchant of Venice in post-war West Germany; prophecy as a trope for performance; political theatre as staged by the RSC’s most recent stagings of the Histories; and a review of Ninagawa Yukio’s recent Doctor Faustus.

Discussion will be open to registered users for six weeks; further instructions for participation are available on the review site. Please stop by and join the discussion!

Please visit the site, read the articles, and leave your feedback for the authors. We very much look forward to your participation.

Our most recent projects are “Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories” and “Fit for Purpose: Developing Business Cases for New Services in Research Libraries”. We are also hosting the peer-to-peer reviews of Jason Mittell’s book-in-progress, Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Narrative and Aram Sinnreich’s The Piracy Crusade: How the Music Industry’s War on Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties.

Previous projects include an open discussion of the Association of American University Press’s report, “Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses”, as well as an open review of articles for potential inclusion in Shakespeare Quarterly‘s special issue on performance, the open review of the essays proposed for the collection Learning Through Digital Media, a discussion of chapter 6 from Thomas Streeter’s book, The Net Effect: Romanticism, Capitalism, and the Internet, the open review conducted for Shakespeare Quarterly special issue on Shakespeare and new media, Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, “MediaCommons: Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet” and “CommentPress: New (Social) Structures for New (Networked) Texts.”

Do you have a conference paper, an article, or a longer manuscript that you’d like feedback on? We’re looking for more projects for our public review system. Contact us via email at editors AT mediacommons DOT futureofthebook DOT org.