 I am Saiyanth Choudhury from the Sharing Library at Johns Hopkins University. I'm joined by my colleague, Roy Britton, who's the editorial director at Johns Hopkins University Press and Wendy Clean, also from J2 Press with the director of Project Muse. We have a couple of other folks in the audience that I'd like to recognize, Barbara Clamp-Holt, who's the director of J2 Press. She's here as well. We have a former colleague, Terri Ayland, who's now in the J2 Press fit, who's involved with this project when she was a Hopkins. And Mark Patton, one of our software developers, is here to keep me honest, I think. So we're here to talk about the Open Educational Resources and the Black Press in American Project. This is a project that has been initiated by Professor Kim Dower at Purdue University when she had a visiting appointment at Hopkins. She's working with a group of other scholars to examine historical African American newspapers to better understand the Black experience from their perspective, through their eyes, their words, their experiences. She received a fellowship from the American Council on Learned Societies to produce some open digital monographs and originally approached the Sharing Libraries to do this for a couple of reasons. One, she likes working with libraries, but second, felt like it would be an interesting opportunity to do some innovative things in terms of publishing the libraries. So as I worked with Kim to this fellowship, it occurred to me that if we had followed that original trajectory, where we would have ended up, basically, is having a series of E-Pub files within the Hopkins Institution and the postcard. Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with that, but we thought we could do better. And I think what you'll see is as we've gone through this journey of working with our colleagues in the press, we're going to end up in a place that we think is much better for everyone involved, particularly the scholars themselves. So a little bit about why this is important from a sort of topic or scholarly perspective. This is actually a screenshot from a CNN article earlier this, sorry, last week. And you can see it says why the Black Press is more relevant than ever. And it talks about, even in the case of during Lyndon Johnson's presidency during a lot of earlier times, that the Black Press was not being represented, its voice was not being shared sort of the mainstream media. It's clearly showing a different view of current events. And I think it's kind of a research that is still true today. If you looked at a lot of the events that are happening today, there's a very different viewpoint depending on what news channel or media you may consume. And there is, in fact, this very clear direct voice coming from the African-American community that we're trying to capture through this project in particular. Now, getting back to the story of how we started to work together, I actually have an engineering background. When I was in school, I was told by my advisor, I think of engineering as the sort of interplay between people, products and processes. So those three sort of facets and the workflows that connect that. So this is something that I have thought of throughout my academic and not my professional career. And in many ways, I think what tends to happen is we converge very quickly on the products. We think very quickly about what's the ultimate help we're going to look like. The UPUP files and the institutional repository, for example. But if you start to think more about the people that are involved throughout these kinds of activities and the processes that each of the authors themselves, the libraries and the presses might have, you know what, I'm not sure where that music starts. It's for a fact. I cued it. If you don't like what I'm saying, just listen to the music. So, getting back to this idea of people, processes and products and the workflows that connect them, we in essence basically started to ask the question, what is the rich view, the richer, broader view of all the people that are involved? What are all the workflows they might adopt? And quite frankly, rather than showing up at some point to say the University Press and saying, here's a bunch of VPOP files, deal with them, work with them, we wanted to work with the press in the early stage in an iterative way to learn more about how the press actually does these kinds of things in the current way, in the future way, and come up with a much more continuous, dynamic, iterative type of approach, which I'll give you some examples at the end, but I'll transition over to Greg, because the next stage in this conversation was to introduce Tim Gallant to you, Greg. And basically start a conversation between the authors and the press. Thanks, Said. My name is Greg Britton. I'm the editorial director at the Johns Hopkins University Press. We publish about 170 new books a year. We publish 90 journals in Humanities and Social Sciences. We have our own distribution center, and we're the institutional home of Project Muse. The way Wendy Queen is running it shortly will be describing the, Project Muse as being the institutional home of the Johns Hopkins University Press. This, before we move forward, I just want to say a few more words about the black press in America. It's really something that begins in earnest in the 1820s in America, and it coalesces around a single issue. It coalesces around the anti-slavery movement. Frederick Douglass, who's on the screen, and of course is an example of somebody who's done an amazing job, and you've been hearing about more and more. He'll be recognized quite a bit. He's actually in a session next door. What a terrific guy. Give it up for Frederick Douglass. He is the first editor of the North Star in 1847, and really I think of as a central character in the founding of the black press. The black press, though, continues to grow and peak sometime in the mid-20th century, where it is, at its height, has about 150 independent newspapers from Chicago and Detroit to Baltimore to Oakland, and Atlanta, it is, when you think of these papers, they're community papers. They are mostly family run. They are, by their very nature, small operations. They serve as a sort of community voice, and they are filled, if you look at these papers, they're filled with not only news told from the black perspective, they're filled with news, with op-eds, with other things. There are recipes, and there are short stories that are published, and poetry written by community members. They are this amazing part of the cultural record that has been overlooked in many ways. They are understudied by historians. They were under-collected by libraries, and I think because of that, there's this enormous body of work that we don't have terrific access to. So when Said called, I was really intrigued by this idea of participating in this project, I knew we had something to offer. Presses have always been good at one thing, which is to take authors and their ideas and transform them, package them for a marketplace. We do that in lots of ways. We manage peer review, we develop works, we copy edit works and design them and produce them, and probably most importantly, we market them to readers. But getting publishers involved in a project complicates things. I remember having a conversation early on with Said when I said, you know, authors are going to want books and we know how to make books, but that raises a question of how we pay for these, and we know how to make books and sell them. That's what we do. But if these are going to be open books, open access books, it complicates things, and that was all part of this conversation. We really started with this fundamental question. I want to switch to the next slide. What does scholars really want? And what it turns out scholars want is kind of everything. They want to be able to exchange ideas early on with other scholars. They want the affordances that the press offers in terms of shaping and professional packaging of things. They love the credentialing and recognition they get from publishing books from a university press. It was really important to the scholars when we talked to them that they have something that is permanent and lasting, and that came down to this fundamental kind of lowest tech denominator of print. But at the same time they wanted these to be open, but they wanted them to be marketed the way our traditional books were marketed. And they also wanted all the affordances of the open web, the discoverability, the audio-visual components that you could add on a project like this, but within context, not just little snippets, but all of the material that they had collected. And they wanted other scholars to contribute to this. So this turned into something that we thought, instead of we're collecting data, the scholars are writing short monographs about this. They're using this material. We started thinking of it within the press as a book series. But as we got into this, we began to think there's something more here. We have this fantastic collection of data. We have scholars working on this. How are we going to reach a larger market? And at that point I realized I had to text Wendy Queen. So I'll start by saying thank you to my colleagues who have given me such a strong voice in this project and process. And the timing of that text to me about Black Press in America couldn't be better because we're in the final stages of Muse Open, which is a grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation to further the distribution, usability, discoverability, and accessibility monographs open access as an extension of an aggregation. So at this point we actually didn't know what content that we were going to feed into Muse Open. So very welcome that text. And so in order to achieve the goals of the grant, we've constructed new capabilities to extend the platform and ensure OA content receives the same high quality treatment as gated content. And as of the summer of 2018, we will have a browser-based reading experience. And this is where we break free from the PDF and allowing more flexibility to create content connections and conversations, which are going to be really important when Said gets to the demo portion of this. We'll have over 300 OA monographs integrated with the gated content, all downstream activities taken care of. So that's the mark records, the linking partners, the preservation. Again, making sure that the OA content is treated as equally as the gated content. And we're also testing business and analytics models. And both of those are quite difficult. So that will be going past the launch this summer. And another component that was important to the grant was to explore partnerships, to support our efforts in creating modern, cost-efficient infrastructure and solutions that fit into the larger publishing distribution infrastructure. So happy to partner with my colleague at the press and my colleague at the library. But we needed more partners than that. So our workflow development around MuseOpen, we have to always think about how do we transform scholarly content at scale. So Muse's goal to keep our costs down, distribute as much as royalties back to the publishers, comes up with what types of systems do we need to make that possible. And to do this for open access content, we embraced using community-supported open source software to transform the EPUB to HTML. And up until this point, all components of Muse have been built in-house. And we made the decision to pivot and create reusable infrastructure workflow components that have a lasting impact for the community. In order to do this, we partnered with COCO, the Collaborative Knowledge Foundation, which I'm so happy. I see them in the press about every other day at this point. And I'll give the endorsement right now that they are the real deal here. And so what COCO has done for us, they have a set of tools in a flexible framework called INC. And INC can take a single EPUB file and break it into parts. And for Muse Open, we are serving at the chapter level and want as much flexibility in the format to create new types of containers for future works. The piece COCO has built for Muse is the conversion from EPUB to HTML. And I should stress INC is a standalone system that can do many functions. So this satisfies many objectives from Muse Open as there are reusable parts. The workflow for our publishers and for our internal staff is low touch. And that's keeping the costs down for our publishers. And it's using open source components which allow us to work more efficiently. And COCO is also developing for projects such as Editoria out of the University of California press. So basically a lot of these pieces can be put together to create a seamless workflow and not have one shop doing all of the work. And BPA for us is a bridge to explore and find solutions as to how to make content more useful and open educational resources. So that's not part of the grant. The grant ends, but this is an opportunity to extend what we've been doing through the grant into other areas. And BPA to me represents a step beyond the integration of OA content on the Muse platform and a step beyond the discoverability of OA content. In our community, there are many ways we are still siloing materials platform to platform or dictating that platforms are format specific. Redundant deposits are one way many have attempted to make users have access to related materials for specific uses. There is a lack of demonstrating new ways to connect content and create new pathways for discovery. Not one platform should be able to do all aspects of publishing and discovery and engagement and learning. The inclusion of Muse in this project allows the balance of experimentation of print, digital monographs, and supplemental materials. We hope that through this collaboration we further the discussion in relating content, disaggregate it, and a robust and engaging user experience. It also represents the opportunity to explore what print means when clustered with many types of digital materials. So again, we're not trying to create a boutique service here, but forward thinking and basically a very assertive use of technology and thinking about what link data can do for us. And the project is unique for Muse because it is not the norm that we have the opportunity to work directly with authors in the beginning of a project to sort of understand what their vision is and understand the content to know what types of tools to build around that content and basically being able to capture the author's vision. And what is also unique about this project is Muse is over 20 years old now, and it started between the library and the press. And now we have the library, the press, and the authors involved in sort of the next generation of where we want to go. And I'm grateful to partner with the authors, but I'm particularly grateful to be able to partner with the experienced technical staff at the library and see where we can take this. And with that said, that's the experienced technical person at the library. I will note that the music stopped when Greg started talking. We could sing for him. One of the interesting aspects of this, again, keep in mind that the original output would have been four e-pop files in Hopkins' institutional repository. At this stage, you can already see the story is much richer than that. We are talking about turnpokes for the reasons that Greg described that are important to the authors. So just be clear, that is, the authors themselves pointed out why those reasons were important. The incorporation of open e-books through the Muse Open grant and platform that Wendy just described. An extension, if you will, of that kind of traditional press workflow into the sort of modern or maybe even future workflows. And then this third tier of content that we talked about that basically is initially called supplementary materials. Another software developer in my group called it Gus, probably not the best choice. So then Greg Britten came up with, what about Bannaker? He's the first African American printer, was sort of a Renaissance man. I think that's a very nice code name, but it was again during a meeting sort of a little bit later into the process where Muse Open was sitting in the room. Well, Wendy actually said, you know, these are educational resources. These are other kinds of resources that are connected to the print books, to the e-books that we're producing, that maybe the library can take more of a lead in terms of how do they get incorporated into the teaching and learning aspects. That the authors, again, felt were very important about their books. These are not just scholarly books for research purposes, but they want them to be used in the learning and teaching environment. So we start to think about this much more as a set of open educational resources and a bigger set of materials that are being produced at this point. So I'll give you a demonstration of this concept. We are being recorded, so I'm actually going to go through a set of screenshots. My laptop over there is, I think, still connected to the internet. The Wi-Fi, and if it is, I'm happy to share it to you live, but I will go through a series of screenshots. So just a couple of points to keep in mind before I go through those. We don't have the content yet, the digital content yet from the authors. So in the meantime, we're using content that we're developing for other digital humanities projects at the libraries to demonstrate what capabilities may exist. What I'll show you is a Hamlet prompt book and a sample of college texts that actually comes from the Princeton University Libraries. And a Mecca, which some of you may be familiar with, is an application, plays a very important part in this particular activity. In two ways. One is, as a place to gather the content from the authors. So sort of a nice, simple, low-barrier way of uploading content, adding metadata according to a schema that we define. And then the creation of digital exhibits. So one thing that, when I was speaking with Greg early on in this project, he said that if you look at book sales, it's fairly typical that they'll spike at the beginning of this sort of drift over time. We bounced around ideas, we talked to people that you don't normally talk to. One idea that came up was, well, you must talk about these books that say, you know, professional society meetings, right? Yes. Well, what if we had exhibits tied with those professional society meetings? Well, if in the American History Association meets, you have an exhibit of these materials that focuses on history. You know, but if the Art History Association meets or so on and so on, you get the idea. So a Mecca's providing this platform for us to continuously revisit those materials, tie them to things like the print books or the e-books or events. A key part of the technology that's driving all this is the international image, sorry, international interoperability image framework. I always get that wrong. I know it's IIIF. It's the underlying data model that we're using to drive a lot of this and that we believe is when you talk about, this is a new form of aggregation. The link data outputs that you'll see are in fact a new form of aggregation. So, if you would start with the IIIF viewer, this would be the very first view you'll get, shameless plug for a session tomorrow morning where Mark Patton and I will go into more detail about the various collections that you see here. But I'm going to focus on this Hamlet Pomp book that I had mentioned to you earlier. This was actually a Pomp book that was used for a class this past summer in Hopkins for what's being called Intensive Undergraduate Humanities courses with the Community College of Baltimore City. We took this Hamlet Pomp book and brought it into this IIIF environment in less than a month. And the scholar who was working with it basically said, there's page one of this Pomp book, there's this page one of that book. If you look in that bottom right corner on the sidebar, which are basically annotations or notes or any kind of marginalia that you wish to add, there are actually some links that are relevant to that particular page, to that particular reference. One being a Wikipedia entry on Ghosts as described in Hamlet and the other being an article in Muse. So you can see the concept here that you are working within a viewing or an annotation order and you are moving into the materials that exist in other places, in other forms and potentially you are getting back to materials in a mecca. The linking I just showed you there is a scholar individually going and saying, I'm making that assertion. Those are important connections to make. This is another link that you can see this is a Ptolemy text that I described to you. And what you're seeing on the side there is a map that is linked automatically from the Perseus project. So we've been doing some investigation around working with Perseus which has a lot of controlled vocabularies, gazetteers, dictionaries, whatever you use to call them and a lot of APIs that we can hit and sort of automatically go through the content and say, oh look, here's a place name, here's a reference. Let's put that content on the screen here as well. So that's another type of thing that you'll be able to do. And then finally I will show you this screenshot which is again, it's that page from the document, but if you look at the bottom of the screen you'll see Powered by Ameca. So we're basically using an Ameca plugin to take triple IF manifests and bring them automatically into Ameca. So the idea again is the authors can work wherever they wish to work. Ameca the viewer, wherever they choose and we will harvest that material put it together and then repurpose it, reuse it and sort of display it as these set of resources that could be used for research and for teaching. So I'll end by showing this screenshot here. We have a project, I'll call it a service now called RMAP, which we developed with the library's development partnership with Portica and IEEE through a grant from the Sloan Foundation and RMAP is in fact a linked data protocol and tool. And what I'm showing you here is an actual linked data graph that we generated from the share network. And as you might imagine what you're seeing here is in fact there's a author or certain type of content whatever you wish and the connections between those. So you can imagine everything I just showed you can be exhibited or manifested in these maps. So these linked data graphs or these discos as we call them in our map are a way for someone to understand the connection. One of these could be an ISBN or a print book or it could be a Muse identifier or it could be a DOI or it could be a IIIF manifest. It could be any kind of content pieces or various types of contents that I describe in this kind of visual graphed way. So this is an aggregation. This is in my view sort of the modern version of an aggregation. Contrast that with the four EPUB files in the institutional cluster. I hope you will agree that this is a much richer much more substantial and useful experience for the authors, for the readers, for the learners, for the press and for the libraries. So with that we will show you some acknowledgments of the organizations that have been funding this work. As Wendy said, actually the funds are for sort of pieces around the BPA. We're doing a lot of this quote on the margins you know what that means. So I very much appreciate all the effort people put in. I think we have plenty of time for questions if you have some. Thank you.