This report describes our accomplishments and areas of work from October 2001-January 2002
SPO invited 4 candidates to campus for interviews for the Interface Designer position.One candidate withdrew at the last moment. In November, we were delighted to offer the position to James Reed, who officially joined SPO in December.
As one of his early activities, Reed has participated in the formation of a usability and interface development group with Matt Stoeffler, Kat Hagedorn and Terri Geitgey. This group provides a forum for the discussion of both collection specific and general system interface issues.
SPO completed a high-level planning document and shared it with DLS staff and with the Library Technology Council.
In November, SPO agreed to take on the project management responsibilities for the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership activities at UofM. As a result of this, Bonn held a series of informational meetings with staff and coordinated meetings on interface development, tiered pricing schemes for vendors and integration of page images with text. Bonn also accompanied Paul Schaffner to Oxford to help set up the production work there and to confer on tools, methods, communication and project promotion.
No formal collaboration has moved forward, although discussions have continued.Bonn met with Phil Pochoda to discuss several possible areas of intersection between the work of SPO and the Press.
The History Ebook was an important focus of work in October.Backlist and frontlist sites were developed and released for review by interested libraries.SPO staff struggled heroically to meet the deadline and to develop new functionality for the project.
Scanning and processing of the backlist titles also continued in Digital Conversion Services and David Richtmeyer continued to work on the catalog records for all the backlist titles.SPO has also undertaken chapter level indexing of all the backlist titles.
In January Maria Bonn and John Wilkin attended project meetings in New York to work on several outstanding issues around the History Ebook project including statistics gathering and methods for calculating royalties. Subsequently, the HEB staff sent a new set of interface prototypes. Reed and Sheppard have been working to evaluate these and give feedback to HEB staff.
Converted 3 sample articles for an online demo of BASP for demonstration at annual business meeting.
Discussions continue on the development of the online translation of the Encyclopedie. Dena Goodman and Bryan Skib have sent out questionnaires and call for translations to seed the project.
Project meetings have resumed and planning is underway for next steps in development of the site.
This electronic project was cut from the UM Press.Since we had already done a test implementation, the Press put the author, Laurel Broughton, in touch with SPO.Prof. Broughton was delighted to move ahead on the project with the Library as the publisher. She is currently reviewing and proofing her data.
Held several conversations with Julie Ellison and David Scobey about developing an online publication series in the New Public Scholarship.Began a proposal outlining the purpose of such a project, possible content and available and necessary resources.
Began work with Mary Radar and the staff of the South Asia center on the development of an electronic working papers archive.
Met with Tony Campbell of Imago Mundi, a journal of cartographic history, about possible collaboration on an online version and conversion of back issues.
Met with Endangered Species Update, a journal from the School of Natural Resources, about putting it online; recieved and began looking at several years of electronic files.
Rosenblum completed and released the Cafe Shapiro anthology.
Some 300 books were sent to Digital Imaging to spend out the remaining grant funds.Several problems arose in the final reconciliation of accounts for MoA4. Pat Hodges and Scott Ward have worked at great length on untangling these problems.
SPO completed and released its informational brochure. Bonn talked to Librarian'd5s Forum about SPO and its activities.Planning is underway for focus groups to be held in February.
Bonn continues to serve on the reprography task force. She also attended meetings of the Library Technology Council (and briefed LTC on SPO's goals for the year) and led the Senior Managers' planning group on "Planning and Scholarly Directions," looking specifically at changes in publication patterns and the ways in which the Library should respond.
Reed is serving on the Library Web Advisory Group and will be participating in interviews for the Library Web master.
Maria Bonn gave a demonstration to librarians from Oberlin College and to the Michigan Research Library Triangle "sharing circle" Bonn chaired a panel on electronic publishing efforts in digital libraries at the November DLF Forum in Pittsburgh.Bonn also attended a luncheon with Ed Ayers and participated in a discussion on issues raised by digital projects in the humanities, and a luncheon with Dan Greenstein and Suzanne Thorin to discuss digital library development.
Rosenblum wrote an article for Roy Tennant's book on XML in libraries and submitted a proposal to the International Electronic Publishing conference.He also visited Edwards Bros. and Art & Architecture Copy Center to explore options for reprints.