Books.Files: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry

Final report for a sponsored research project.The book industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders in the cultural heritage sector (libraries, archives, and academia) as well as in the industry itself. The report addresses the changing technological and organizational circumstances in the creation and collecting of publishers' archives, with an emphasis on the enumeration of the types and variety of digital assets that may form the primary basis for such archives in the future. It emphasizes the extent to which every book published (not just ebooks as such) is in fact "born-digital," and the implications of this shift for future historical and bibliographical scholarship. It concludes with a set of recommendations.The Andrew W. Mellon Foundatio

"Poor Black Squares": Afterimages of the Floppy Disk

Chapter 21 of The Routledge Companion to Media Technology and Obsolescence, ed. Mark J.P. Wolf (New York and London: Routledge, 2019): 296-310

Operating Systems of the Mind: Bibliography After Word Processing (the Example of Updike)

Published in PBSA 108.4. Began as the annual address to the Bibliographical Society of America in 2014; also given as the Mann Lecture at Penn State and at RBS in Charlottesville. Inspired, of course, by D. F. McKenzie's great paper, "Printers of the Mind.

ENGL 479P: BookLab

Syllabus for ENGL 479P: BookLab, an upper-division undergraduate course at the University of Maryland. Taught with the resources and facilities of the Department of English's BookLab, the course is a historical, imaginative, and experiential introduction to the multitudinous forms of what is not the oldest but is surely among the most enduring of human technologies, the codex book

ENGL 759C BookLab: How to Do Things with Books

Graduate-level syllabus for a seminar in the Department of English. Neither "history of the book" nor "media studies," this course sits somewhere in-between combining the ethos of a makerspace with the hands-on resources of a letterpress and book arts studio

ENGL 759C Approaches to the Material Text

Syllabus for spring 2021 graduate seminar, "Approaches to the Material Text." Readings survey in history of the book and related fields. Includes prose introductions synthesizing each week's readings

Literary Letters Lost and Found in Cyberspace

This presentation was given at The Library in Bits and Bytes: Digital Library Symposium, held at the University of Maryland on 29 September 2005

Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use

Digital Humanities Initiative Level 1 Start Up funding is requested to support a series of site visits and planning meetings among personnel working with the born-digital components of three significant collections of literary material: the Salman Rushdie papers at Emory University's Woodruff Library, the Michael Joyce Papers at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Deena Larsen Collection at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. The meetings and site visits will facilitate the preparation of a larger collaborative grant proposal among the three institutions aimed at developing archival tools and best practices for preserving and curating the born-digital documents and records of contemporary authorship. Initial findings will be made available through a jointly authored and publicly distributed online white paper, as well as conference presentations at relevant venues

Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections

Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections examines digital forensics and its relevance for contemporary research. The applicability of digital forensics to archivists, curators, and others working within our cultural heritage is not necessarily intuitive. When the shared interests of digital forensics and responsibilities associated with securing and maintaining our cultural legacy are identified—preservation, extraction, documentation, and interpretation, as this report details—the correspondence between these fields of study becomes logical and compelling.Council on Library and Information Resource

Books.Files: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry (A Report)

The book publishing industry is an important social, cultural, and economic institution whose records deserve to be preserved for the public good. Books.Files was an exploratory project funded in part by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation aimed at assessing the archival value of digital assets in the contemporary publishing industry for stakeholders in the cultural heritage sector (libraries, archives, and academia) as well as in the industry itself. The report addresses the changing technological and organizational circumstances in the creation and collecting of publishers' archives, with an emphasis on the enumeration of the types and variety of digital assets that may form the primary basis for such archives in the future. It emphasizes the extent to which every book published (not just ebooks as such) is in fact "born-digital," and the implications of this shift for future historical and bibliographical scholarship. It concludes with a set of recommendations