Overview

As part of the Mellon Foundation’s support for higher education, the Scholarly Communications program focuses broadly on all stages in the life cycle of scholarly resources. The program complements fellowships and other kinds of support for research and teaching at research universities, liberal arts colleges, independent research centers, libraries, and museums by promoting the cost-effective creation, dissemination, accessibility, and preservation of high-quality scholarly resources in humanistic studies broadly defined.

The University of Arizona Press has received its second grant in 2009 from the distinguished Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This $282,000 one-year planning grant has been given to the University of Arizona Press, along with five other university presses, to collaboratively develop a digital collection of New World archaeology scholarship.

The University of Arizona Press, the University of Alabama Press, the University Press of Colorado, the University Press of Florida, the Texas A&M University Press, and the University of Utah Press will jointly explore ways to deliver data- and illustration-rich digital editions of cutting-edge archaeological research. The project, called the Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative, will give scholars and professional archaeologists the ability to review supplemental data not often contained in conventionally published volumes.

“This initiative enables each press to break out of the traditional monograph form, in which it is often financially impossible to offer digital resources alongside the book,” said Kathryn Conrad, Interim Director of the University of Arizona Press. Like scholarly books in other humanities fields, sales of archaeology title remain limited. Presses must enforce strict length and image limitations to constrain production costs. The books produced as part of this initiative will be enhanced by large data sets, color illustrations, video components, three-dimensional, rotatable images, and in some cases, interactive components such as reader commenting. Ultimately, the digital platform could “quite possibly change the way scholarly resources are produced in the future,” Conrad said.

The University Press of Colorado will administer the planning grant, which will fund a shared project manager. If the program reaches full implementation, the presses could potentially create a third-party entity devoted to the creation and maintenance of the digital platform. The presses also plan to work on a business model for the proposed platform. In addition, the presses plan to develop a prototype digital book, providing a workable platform that could potentially be used by scholarly presses around the world. While the initiative will involve publishing many books both in print and digital form, the participating presses will enhance digital editions with data not currently available in most printed books in the field.

University of Arizona Press Editor-in-Chief Allyson Carter said the strength of the archaelogy-focused digital initiative lies in the participating presses' depth and breadth in New World archaeology. The University of Arizona Press has been committed to publishing exceptional anthropological and archaeological research since it was founded in 1959. It currently has more than 200 archaeology titles in print, including J. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey's highly regarded The Archaeology of Ancient Arizona . Together, the six participating presses publish more than 70 titles in this field annually, covering the southeastern and southwestern United States, the Mountain West, the Great Basin, Texas, Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.