May 3
I am very pleased to have been invited to the University of Minnesota to speak to the faculty and librarians there about scholarly communications. I will surely share reflections after the event but I wanted to pass on the details now. I really look forward to talking to, and learning from, everyone there. I am very appreciative of this opportunity. Find the details here.
In an earlier post, I mentioned my attendance at one day of a conference in Hannover Germany called “Commons, Users, Service Providers: Internet (Self-)Regulation and Copyright.” The theme on the day (March 18, 2010) that I attended was “Commons-Free Software, Free Content, Open Access.” Now that I am trying to catchup on a a year’s worth of academic loose ends (our semester is just now ending) I wish that I could offer a fuller report of the conference. I think that I will need to settle for a comment or two and a word of thanks.
I especially benefited from a couple of presentations. One of these was “GNU GPL Version 3: The Law Making Process” by Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University. Professor Moglen has been very involved in the development of the GPL and he spoke of it in light of the ways that such arrangements represent a kind of non-governmental international law-making framework. He described the approach used in GPL3 as emphasizing new and general language that does not provoke default assumptions in any particular national jurisdiction. Other presenters spoke of other pathways toward internationalizing other IP/copyleft instruments. He was ill and unable to attend in person but prepared a very remarkable video that he sent to the conference. I hope that it is placed online as it would standalone very well even though it addressed the conference and conferees directly.
The two other presentations that I will mention were “Creative Commons International: Achievements and Perspectives” by Catharina Maracke and “Linux, Wikipedia and Other Networks: Governed by Bilateral Contracts, Corporations, or Something in Between?” by Dan Wielsch. Professor Maracke is the former director of Creative Commons International. She is now teaching at Keio University in Japan. He talk was a great overview of the approach that has been taken in internationalizing the Creative Commons toolkit. In contrast to the GPL, this has involved creating local versions for each national jurisdiction. Professor Wielsch teaches at the University of Cologne and his talk described research on the evolution of community governance in massive collaborative content production projects such as Wikipedia. While a subject that numerous people have been discussing in recent years, his presentation was clear and effective. As a non-specialist I learned a lot from it and from many of the presentations.
(Strangely, the area where I had the most background–open access–was the focus for the only presentation that, it seemed to me, was the most out of sync with the spirit of the day’s discussions and most contrary with my own understandings and views of the topic.)
As the first formal academic conference that I have ever attended in Germany, the even was very instructive. While mostly native German-speakers, the audience and presenters controlled and used perfect English. I both appreciated this fact (at a practical level) and found it a source of guilt (as an advocate of linguistic and cultural diversity).
I was in Germany as a guest of the DFG Cultural Property Research Group at the University of Göttingen and was hosted at the Hannover Conference by Mr. Philipp Zimbehl and Professor Dr. Gerald Spindler. I wish to extend my appreciation to them and to my overall hosts Professor Dr. Regina Bendix and Ms. Arnika Peselmann.
I am very pleased to announce the publication of Museum Anthropology Review 4(1). This is the spring 2010 issue and there are a number of things to say about it. First, a huge expression of thanks go to everyone who worked to bring it into the world. Managing editor Janice Frisch in particular deserves special credit for working hard to bring several new features online.
First things first, the issue contains a lot of wonderful content. Measured in old-fashioned pages, the issue serves up 143 pages brought to the world by twenty-two generous and smart authors. Thanks to all.
The issue is also the first in which we have published a contribution in a language other than English. Christian Bromberger’s valuable essay “From Race To Culture To Esthetics: A Museographic Journey into French Ethnology” is published here in both French and English versions. My Indiana University colleagues Raymond J. DeMallie and Noemie Waldhubel assisted in the preparation of Professor Bromberger’s bilingual essay for publication. Where possible, we hope to publish additional content in languages other than English thereby contributing to the further internationalization of museum and material culture studies.
MAR 4(1) is the first for which we are offering contributions in both PDF and a new HTML format designed to match the new journal style that was developed last year. While several early issues of the journal featured content in a very rough and ready HTML format, we are now using a relatively sophisticated (CSS) style sheet and we hope that we have really improved reader’s experiences with the journal. If you encounter problems, please let us know.
As always, MAR is a fully open access journal that is available to all interested readers at no cost. This is possible because of the wonderful support provided by the very talented librarians behind Indiana University Bloomington’s IUScholarWorks project. They are heroes in the work of building a better and more ethical system of scholarly communication.
Please consider signing up as a “Reader” at the journal’s website. Its free and it helps us measure support for the journal. You’ll also get table of contents sent twice per year by email. Museum Anthropology Review is also on Facebook.
Mar 18
I am in Hannover for the day at the final day of a conference titled “Commons, Users, Service Providers: Internet (Self-) Regulation and Copyright. The focus today is Commons – Free Software, Free Content, Open Access and I have already learned a lot. I will try to write it up when it is complete. So far there have been presentations by insiders on the GPL, internationalizing Creative Commons, and on court cases related to open source software.
[from an AFS announcement]
Call for Book Proposals
The University of Illinois Press, the University Press of Mississippi, and the University of Wisconsin Press, in cooperation with the American Folklore Society and with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, are collaborating to host an author’s workshop at the 2010 conference of the American Folklore Society for authors working on their first book. Up to six authors will be selected to participate in a full day of intensive activities devoted to critiquing and developing their individual projects. Workshop activities will include one-on-one mentoring sessions with editors and senior scholars and group discussions of revision and editing strategies, publishing processes, and project critiques. A modest stipend will be provided to participants to help defray the costs of attending the workshop.
This opportunity is open only to authors preparing their first books. Projects must be single-authored, nonfiction books based on folklore research. Edited volumes, photography collections with minimal text, and memoirs will not be considered.
Projects selected for the workshop will be candidates for publication in the Presses’ new collaborative series, Folklore Studies in a Multicultural World, which aims to publish exceptional first books that emphasize the interdisciplinary and/or international nature of the field of folklore. Within the series, each Press will focus on specific aspects of folklore studies related to its areas of expertise: Illinois on gender and queer studies, world folk cultures, and multiculturalism as manifested in forms of vernacular expression such as music, dance, and foodways; Mississippi in folk art, American folk music, African American studies, popular culture, and Southern folklife; and Wisconsin in folklore studies that intersect with Upper Midwest cultures, Irish/Irish-American studies, Jewish studies, Southeast Asian studies, gay/lesbian studies, foodways, and travel. Applicants may indicate in their proposal whether they have a preference of publisher.
Proposals should be submitted via e-mail between January 1, 2010 and April 1, 2010, to fsmw@uillinois.edu. For submission guidelines, please see http://folklorestudies.press.illinois.edu/guidelines.html.
Congratulations to everyone involved in moving the journal Anthropology of East Europe Review to the IUScholarWorks Journals project. Find the new issue–27(2)–online here:
http://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/aeer/index
Dec 7
From an AFS news release on behalf of the Fund for Folk Culture:
The Indiana University Bloomington Libraries and the American Folklore Society, in partnership with The Fund for Folk Culture and the Indiana University Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, are pleased to announce the availability of a series of policy publications created by The Fund for Folk Culture.
The Fund, which was created in 1992 and suspended its programs in early 2009, supports the creation, conservation, innovation, and value of traditional culture and folk arts in community life through grantmaking, convenings, the creation of networks, and research and publications, all focused on issues critical to artists, tradition bearers, and the organizations supporting their work. Its goal is to “create a world in which diverse cultural heritages are honored and all people have the right and resources to exercise preservation of their cultural traditions and to create new traditions for the times.”
The body of Fund for Folk Culture publications now available includes a three-part Issues in Folk Arts and Traditional Culture Working Paper series; reports on three meetings devoted to the examination of issues facing refugee and immigrant communities, and individual folk artists, in the US; a report on the “Folklore’s Futures: Scholarship and Practice” symposium sponsored by the Fund and the American Folklore Society in 2006; and two monographs, Culture and Commerce: Traditional Arts in Economic Development and Envisioning Convergence: Cultural Conservation, Environmental Stewardship and Sustainable Livelihoods. Other Fund publications will be made available in the near future.
These published works are being made available in digital form as part of the IUScholarWorks Repository. In this form, each published work has a durable URL (web address) that will remain stable, insuring that future citations to this work will lead back to the full source itself. This published work is fully open access and documents are provided in PDF format. The IUB Libraries are committing to the migration of these materials to future file formats so as to preserve the availability of these works. The IUScholarWorks Repository uses standard metadata protocols, insuring that the works included in it are easily findable through such services as Google Scholar and OAIster, the Open Archives Initiative database, a union catalog containing records for millions of digital scholarly resources.
Now available and searchable in IUScholarWorks Repository, the publications of The Fund for Folk Culture join a growing corpus of fully accessible publications in folklore studies, including the full back files of The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist and Folklore Forum. The IUB Libraries and the American Folklore Society are exploring the possibility of other partnerships to create greater accessibility for important classes of publication in our field that are presently without a long-term digital home.
Find the publications of The Fund for Folk Culture online here: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/3850
I am very pleased to report that Museum Anthropology Review, the journal of material culture and museum studies that I edit (with the help of many great colleagues), now boasts a new and improved look and feel. MAR is published using Open Journal Systems by the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries as part of the IUScholarWorks Project. My wonderful library colleagues have done great work on our behalf designing a crisp and appealing new journal style (ie. CSS). The new look is visible on the site now. With the next issue (MAR 4(1)), the new content will appear in a nice matching HTML format. I hope that everyone finds these enhancements to be a significant improvement on the basic style with which we began. Thanks to all of the IUScholarWorkers for this wonderful work and thanks to all of the authors, editors, peer-reviewers, media reviewers, and readers who are making MAR a big (free-to-the-world) success.
I am so pleased with this enhancement and I cannot say enough good things about everyone at the IUB Libraries. Their commitment to building up a sensible open access (OA) scholarly communications system is inspirational and contagious.
If you find any bugs in the new style, please let us know by email at museumanthropologyreview (at) gmail (dot) com.
Not a registered reader yet? Its free, it gets you tables of contents sent by email twice per year, and it helps us demonstrate a growing readership. Please sign up and help the cause of OA journal publishing.
Berg Publishers (acquired last year by Bloomsbury) has just announced an agreement through which its Berg Fashion Library (an online resource for dress and fashion studies) will be distributed globally by Oxford University Press. See also Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, now an Rowman and Littlefield partnership.
As Inside Higher Education has reported today, the American Geographical Society has entered into a partnership with Wiley-Blackwell to publish its journals Geographical Review and FOCUS on Geography. (W-B press release here.) This move follows similar agreements made by the American Anthropological Association and a multitude of other publishing societies.
Shreds and Patches 