open access | Ken Wachsberger's Blog

"In my last blog post I told you that in my next blog post I would introduce what is to date the most extensive project ever to digitize underground, alternative, and literary publications from the fifties through the eighties. This is that post. I also said I would describe the economic model that is making this project possible at about one-fifth the cost to libraries that other digital publishers would charge, and with open access, not perpetual profits, as a result—an absolutely unique concept in the digitizing field. I’ll do that in my next post. If you are a librarian at any institution of higher learning who wants to enhance your collections of digital resources without busting your budget, this model was created with you in mind. You might even own an archive in your collection that you would like to see digitized. If it can fit into this economic model, we need to talk.  I’m a veteran of the Vietnam era underground press and now a historian. My four-volume Voices from the Underground Series is a collection of insider histories of underground papers from the period as written by key folks on each of the papers. Stories represent the gay, Black, Native American, Puerto Rican, military, psychedelic, rank-and-file worker, prisoners’ rights, campus, community, socialist, Southern consciousness, new age, and other antiwar voices of the period.  And also the feminist and lesbian voices. Carol Anne Douglas/Fran Moira’s and Marilyn Webb’s stories about off our backs, the first major national feminist paper to emerge on the east coast, appear in volume 1; the history of It Aint Me Babe, the San Francisco-based national feminist publication that actually preceded off our backs, is told by members of the collective in volume 3, along with Ginny Berson’s history of The Furies, the legendary paper put out by twelve self-proclaimed revolutionary lesbian feminists who were known collectively as the Furies.  For the past four years, I have been part of a team of researchers and digitizing specialists who are working on a project to digitize underground, alternative, and literary publications from the fifties through the eighties. My role has been to come up with names of papers that I want to include in the collection, figure out who I need to contact for permission to scan them, and then contact those folks and obtain permission.  Our goal is to digitize a million pages in four years. Our motivations are two-fold: to preserve the most important writings of our generation, which are now hidden in dark shelves of special collections libraries—where young scholars seldom roam—and are beginning to yellow and crumble with age; and to make them available to current and future generations of activists, who look first—and too often only—to digital resources for their research information. If the readers don’t come to you, you go to the readers ..."