We’re working on highlighting the search terms on the page, but there’s no ETA on that yet. You can track the work from the technology pages: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/sobekcm/development/highlights
Also, I’ll of course be blogging as new features are implemented and as we have concrete timelines.

Thanks again,
Amy

We have talked extensively in this meeting about the publication of journals and monographs. Another way to explore the efficacy of publication-based peer review, however, is to consider its application in an altogether new area of activity. One of the hottest emergent areas of scholarly communication is the growth of mechanisms to curate primary source data, particularly those in digital form, on which research and teaching depends in particular fields of study in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Along with curation, a related area of growth is in emergent means of publishing those data or subsets that are relevant to particular work. Few fields have worked out mechanisms for the evaluation of the quality, integrity, format, relevance, and importance of primary source curation and publication in digital form. Peer review is much needed as an organizational function because fields that depend on digital primary sources will prosper or suffer to the extent that experts in the field collectively develop appropriate standards and incentives for the proper handling and dissemination of that material.

Let’s focus for the moment on the case of the humanities, where the development of primary source material as a basis for research and teaching has a very long tradition in philology, editorial practice, and edition-making. Over the last 25 years, just as the transition from print to digital began, the practice of primary source curation and publication has been deeply undervalued professionally within many fields. This trend has produced perverse results, including the widening cultural gap between scholars and librarians. In addition, publishers have been engaged in a kind of “land grab” for digitized primary sources. High prices for digital access have created digital divides between the “haves” and “have-nots,” and this is increasingly worrisome in fields like medieval and early modern studies. Moreover, the quality of online materials is increasingly questioned as scholars become more interested and better trained in digital analysis methods. The Burney Collection at the British Library, for example, contains rare and important 18th century newspapers and periodicals. It has always been an important source for characterizing the early emergence of new print genres. Now that that this and other collections are being digitized and the use of optical character recognition (OCR) has made full-text searching possible, it is increasingly important to ask how representative of the total universe of early printed materials the Burney collection is. The answer to this critical question requires standard bibliographies of the period to be properly linked to the digitized materials. The poor quality of OCR on early printed material and analysis using computational techniques also require much more accurate transcriptions. The processes of identification and cataloging, and of structuring the primary sources in forms usable for scholarship, are age-old “curatorial” activities, but they need to be examined and applied anew in the digital age.

The curation of primary sources in digital form represents a new genre of scholarly communications activity across a whole range of disciplines: astronomical sky surveys, genomics/proteomics databases, architectural history databases, letters and papers of primary authors, papyri, and so on. All of these data are being converted to or generated in digital form and then organized as scholarly projects to propel research and teaching forward for the next generation. There is so much innovation and experimentation that it is difficult to classify this new genre. Some of these projects exhibit edition-like properties; they look like published editions, defining primary sources with contextual essays and other scholarly apparati. Some are book-like or journal-like because they produce scholarly material about a subject. Many are lab-like because they require an elaborate division of labor, with specialists of various kinds responsible for a variety of different tasks including design, technology development, and execution. Indeed, the assembly of the material and contextual apparatus can often be divided up so that students in an undergraduate classroom, or even the broader public outside the Academy, can contribute effectively to the work. Good examples of engaging the broader public include the kinds of amateur involvement that you see in astronomy, ornithology, and, more recently, geography, where the public is identifying photographs, individuals in photographs, and where photographs are located on a map.