Tag Archives: scholarly publishing

Matthew Walther on the funding cuts at University Press of KY

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“Conservatives of all people should be appalled by the disdain shown for tradition, the life of the mind, and the past itself exhibited by Bevin and his fellow Kentucky Republicans. As I write this, among the many volumes forthcoming from the University of Kentucky Press is a 300-page collection of the letters of Russell Kirk, precisely the sort of project that would be ruinous for any mainstream publisher to undertake no matter how many units the latest Kardashian sisters cookbook shifts.”

Read the rest.

Textbook American Revolution

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The University of Chicago Press recently issued a two volume narrative history of the United States that is freely available online and reasonably priced ($30) in paperback.

As someone who’s responsible for my college’s history collection (and a former history teacher) I’m both impressed and excited for the future. These sorts of quality and reasonably priced offerings from scholarly presses (see also MIT Press) bode well for the future of scholarly publishing.

Check it out HERE.

Institutional Repositories (IR)

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Does your institution have an institutional repository? If not, should you? Routledge has made some great new scholarship on institutional and subject repositories freely available until September 30, 2016. These articles provide a great look at many of the issues (practical and otherwise) surrounding institutional repositories in higher education.

Preservation Ecosystem

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One of the many ways that libraries help to preserve the memories, documents, and other artifacts that sustain human communities is through preservation. In an increasingly digital world, issues of digital preservation are vital. Here’s one way that several universities are working together to help preserve our collective heritage.

Colonial North American Project

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Harvard Library is in the process of digitizing and releasing all known archival and manuscript materials in the Harvard Library that relate to 17th and 18th century North America. More information HERE.

Library-Publisher Partnership at MIT

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Image credit to flickr.com/photos/cdevers/5702488800/

Under new direction, the Libraries and the Press are revisiting their own missions and core values, and have converged in part around the principle of adaptability. Namely, both organizations share the aims to actively engage in the changing technologies, practices and policies around creating and sharing information; embrace an entrepreneurial ethos that welcomes thoughtful risk taking and is not afraid to learn from failures; and adapt continually to the changing needs of the communities they serve…Read the rest.

Loving Literature: A Cultural History

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Loving Literature: A Cultural History. By Deidre Shauna Lynch. University of Chicago Press, 2014. 352p. HB, $40.

A delightful review, by William Giraldi, of  Loving Literature: A Cultural History by Deidre Shauna Lynch in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Here’s a juicy excerpt: If you’re looking to trace the more recent history of how the English department came to be known as a bastion of muddled thinking, you might begin with those two paladins of post-structuralist theory, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Their deconstructionist shenanigans, their absurd and absurdist skepticism, posited that language doesn’t really mean what it says, that language must always be a puzzle pointing to other puzzles. The real puzzle was how anyone could have erected a theory upon a void, a theory that chose to ignore what lay on the page and focus instead on what wasn’t there.