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Hypermedia Online Publishing: the Transformation of the Scholarly Journal

8.6.2 Origins and organisation

Project Muse arose originally from informal discussions between Susan Lewis and Todd Kelley. They both identified the strengths of the journals published by the press and felt that moving into electronic publication would have significant advantages. The initial development took place in a very bottom-up way, driven by the commitment of these two individuals. The original aims were to:

reduce the cost of publication to users;
forge a different approach to intellectual property and copyright
test new economic models within the scholarly communication environment;
test new ways of using network technologies.

Both the library and the press recognised that significant seed-funding was required. They made the decision to seek grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and to use the Web (then very new) as the technology platform. These grant applications were both successful, and development commenced.

The library helped enormously with setting up the project and with raising money through fundraising. They developed the university wide relationships between the various players. They also had the technical expertise in online information (but none in publishing). This meant that the logical relationship was for Todd Kelley and Susan Lewis to partner together. Susan Lewis got the files from the press' production system and had them translated into Postscript. The library provided the server, organised the information, and embedded metadata into the articles to assist with searching. In effect, the press provided the content, and the library added value through cataloguing, searchability and dissemination.

Last modified: Monday, 11-Dec-2017 14:41:57 AEDT