Crowdfunding Access to Archives | Backtalk

"Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University (NU), Boston, and his colleagues are studying how information went 'viral' in 19th-century America, when newspapers and periodicals published short works of fiction, poetry, and other prose. Before modern copyright law, it was common for editors to reprint these texts, originally published elsewhere. The texts moved around the country through this network, resulting in a shared print culture. Cordell’s research seeks to identify these shared texts, to examine which were reprinted and why, and to map how they traveled and changed as they passed from publication to publication. To begin, Cordell and David Smith, an NU professor of computer and information science, downloaded the text of the entire corpus of pre-1860 newspapers available from the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America website. They performed a computational analysis using algorithms they developed to identify matching texts. Thus far, the project team has identified thousands of viral texts, including minor pieces by major authors who were more influential than previously recognized. They have also mashed up the data with other open data to reveal connections between viral texts and the expansion of railroads, the establishment of political boundaries, and local population characteristics ... Yet, according to Cordell, there are 'glaring holes' in his research. His data includes no content from Massachusetts—and Boston was a major publishing center of the time. There is also very little available to him from New York or Philadelphia, also vital to the period. He lacks this content because it is locked up in commercial databases. Although his institution subscribes to a number of these databases, the ability to download the text for analysis is unavailable ... Before the digital era, libraries and cultural institutions entered into agreements with vendors to microfilm their collections and market the microfilm to other libraries, enabling broad access to the content that was not previously possible. As these vendors now build digital archival products, they have returned to the libraries to negotiate rights to resell the content in digital form.  Still, it is not only these legacy microfilm collections that are being marketed to libraries digitally. A perusal of the websites of Adam Matthew, Alexander Street, EBSCO, Gale, ProQuest, and Readex shows that they are working with libraries and other institutions to create newly digitized archival collections at a prolific rate ... There is an alternative for libraries that want to digitize archival collections and make them freely available to all. There have been a number of recent initiatives that use crowdfunding to cover the costs of making materials available via open access, for example, SCOAP3 for journals in high-energy physics, Knowledge Unlatched for scholarly ebooks in the humanities and social sciences, and Open Library of Humanities for articles and books in the humanities. For the digitization of archival materials, a similar initiative is Reveal Digital.  Founded in 2011, Reveal Digital relies on libraries to crowdfund specific digitization projects.  Its initial effort, Independent Voices, will result in the digitization of over one million pages of alternative press periodicals in the collections of partner libraries. Digitized materials will initially be available only to libraries providing financial support for the project, but after an embargo period, the content will become fully open access and the full-text corpus will be available for data mining ..."