Open Scholarship: A Portfolio on Funding, Globalising and Enhancing
Funding open access in media studies: The case of mediastudies.press
by Jefferson Pooley
This case study recounts the brief history of the open access publisher mediastudies.press, with the aim to draw broader lessons about #openaccess in film, media, and communication studies. The press, which I established in 2018, is scholar-led, nonprofit, and fee-free. It publishes books and a diamond OA journal, History of Media Studies (2020-). Mediastudies.press was founded as a self-conscious experiment, with three overlapping motivations: (1) to demonstrate the viability of a collective funding, fee-free approach to OA publishing; (2) to provide a home for book projects underserved by the commercial publishing ecosystem; and (3) to furnish a platform for multimedia and versioned projects particularly appropriate to the kinetic and formally inventive media studies fields. A fourth motivation was more personal. I had begun writing about open access issues in the mid-2010s with gathering interest.[1] My sense was that I ought to learn more about the scholarly publishing landscape if I was to make informed critiques of, and proposals around, the prevailing system. Diving in head first with a small press struck me as a viable – if over-ambitious – means to that end. Thus mediastudies.press was born.
This report touches on the history of the press, its evolving practices, and its plans for the future. Throughout, I draw on parallel experiments both within and beyond media studies, with an attempt to reference the ongoing struggle to reclaim scholarly publishing from the big five oligarchs.[2] That broad campaign, I have concluded, ultimately hinges on an urgent, short-run scaling-up of an alternative approach to funding, one which charges neither readers nor authors.
The collective funding problem
The open access movement was semi-officially kicked off just over 20 years ago, when scholars, librarians, and others gathered in Budapest. The group’s 2022 manifesto was, among other things, nonchalant about the question of who should pay for publishing. The point, of course, was to remove the paywall for readers, but the Budapest Open Access Declaration did not say much about who would pick up the bill. The manifesto cited ‘many alternative sources’, including governments and foundations, universities, and ‘friends of the cause of open access’. The Budapest declarees’ list ended with a fateful Boolean: ‘or even contributions from researchers themselves’.[3]
Just a month before the Budapest gathering, a for-profit publisher (BioMed Central) had announced a processing charge for each article the group would publish – birthing the Author Processing Charge (APC) in the process.[4] Then the high-profile nonprofit Public Library of Science (PLOS) embraced the APC model for its 2003 launch.[5] Soon Springer, the commercial giant, adopted the author fee, settling on $3,000 – apparently the maximum that funders like the Wellcome Trust would stomach. Springer’s peers followed suit, and the APC era was born. Barriers for authors were, in this model, swapped for barriers to readers.[6]
The system only worked for funded natural scientists and scholars from a handful of rich Western countries. The APC model, with its tolled access to authorship, was the subscription model seen through a camera obscura: author paywalls in place of reading paywalls. My own interest in scholarly publishing came to center on what I started calling the ‘open authorship’ movement. It was plain then, as it is now, that if you can not ask readers to pay, nor authors, the only alternative is to fund publishing directly.[7]
Experiments in what was sometimes called ‘collective’ or ‘consortial’ funding began to take off in the early 2010s, at arXiv, Open Library of Humanities, and SCOAP³, among others. The core idea was to ask libraries and other funders to redirect some of their subscription spending to support, directly, open access publishing. The aim was to avoid the author-excluding APC and to enable, instead, what was at the time called ‘platinum’ or ‘diamond’ OA.
mediastudies.press was founded, basically, as a rebuke of the APC and its longform cousin, the book publishing charge (BPC). By 2018, when I began thinking seriously about starting a press, I had concluded (along with many others) that an author-excluding OA ecosystem would be worse than the tolled system it aimed to replace. Collective funding experiments were, at the time, gaining traction, and I was convinced that some of the challenges (around logistics, vetting, and free-ridership) could be met. So I was toying with the idea of a press, though with trepidation: I was a busy academic already overwhelmed by the job’s spread of commitments.
Then ScholarLed was born – a consortium of six academic-led, non-profit book publishers. The moment when I saw the Twitter announcement in early 2018 is lodged in my memory. Here was a group of like-minded presses – nonprofit, scholar-led, and fee-free by principle: ‘BPCs aggravate already entrenched inequities in access to the means of scholarly publication.’ They had me at ‘aggravate’.[8]
mediastudies.press soon incorporated as a nonprofit in Pennsylvania, where I live and work. I recruited an initial board of directors and an advisory board, but the whole thing felt imaginary for at least a year. That year I tested various open-source platforms, including Janeway (for journals) and Manifold (for books), before setting up shop on PubPub, the open-source scholarly publishing platform built by the nonprofit Knowledge Futures in 2019. PubPub’s format agnositicism, together with its support for versioning and multimedia, made it possible for the press to operate its book and journal sides on a single platform.[9]
All the while, I was probing around the collective-funding question. The press proclaimed, with aspirational gusto, that
[p]ublishing with mediastudies.press is free on principle. Our aim is to demonstrate, on a small scale, an open access publishing model supported by libraries rather than author fees. Open access for readers, we believe, should not be traded for new barriers to authorship.[10]
Our first books, released in late 2020, were a pair of public domain republications, on the theory that dead authors were easier to work with. We had no revenue coming in, of course, and yet faced some serious expenses: copy editing and proofing above all, but also design, software, and memberships in organisations like Crossref. mediastudies.press subsisted on donations, mostly from me but also from board members.[11] We were learning a lot and refining workflows, but the collective-funding dimension – which, after all, had indirectly motivated the creation of the press – was dormant. I was watching the library membership programs launched by our better-established ScholarLed peers at punctum books and Open Book Publishers. One-off publisher membership schemes like this, however, struck me as burdensome to libraries, with all that repetitive vetting and invoicing. mediastudies.press, meanwhile, had launched a journal.
History of Media Studies
From the beginning, the press had plans to create a journal. David W. Park, Peter Simonson, and I co-founded History of Media Studies in summer 2020, with many of the same values that animate mediastudies.press itself. One aim was to address the lack of publishing outlets for studies on the history of film, media, and communication studies. Historians of psychology, economics, anthropology, and sociology were already served by standalone outlets. At the same time, generalist history-of-social science journals were, ironically, often too narrow for a bundle of fields that spans the humanities and social sciences – with the same limitation, in reverse, posed by History of Humanities. Thus the new journal was launched to provide a home for rigorous work on the history of our division-spanning, polyglot fields.
The journal’s second major purpose was to self-consciously broaden the scope of the fields’ historiographies. Most published scholarship, we noted at the time, was centered on North America and Western Europe, and published in English. We positioned History of Media Studies to ventilate the literature’s parochial character – in part by bringing non-English studies on neglected geographies into conversation with the North Atlantic bearings of the existing historiography. We recruited a notably international editorial board and launched an affiliated working group where scholars from around the globe would share their works-in-progress in remote sessions. We have held three summer symposia with these field-broadening goals in mind, focused on: (1) exclusions; (2) the Americas; and (3) Africa and the African diaspora. The journal has attended, in particular, to Latin American scholars and scholarship, with simultaneous interpretation at events and full support for Spanish-language submissions.[12]
The third guiding motivation for History of Media Studies mimics the press itself: we aim to model APC-free OA publishing with support for multimedia and versioning. The journal also commissions and/or accepts a number of non-traditional formats, including overlay republication of relevant articles published elsewhere and contextualised archival materials. A commitment to slow scholarship and care-based review has also marked the journal’s short tenure. ‘History of Media Studies’, as we wrote in the launch editorial, ‘substitutes artisanal editing and humane peer review for ScholarOne and the metric tide.’[13]
So the fee-free model – by then converging on the diamond nomenclature, at least in the journal world – was front-and-center, just as it had been on the book side. But with History of Media Studies we faced the same basic problem: how could we go hand-to-hat to libraries as a single journal, given the unsustainable logistical burdens on the librarians we were asking to cut checks?
The mission-aligned funding exchange
By 2021, I was beginning to question the wisdom of self-funding, with the help of other board members, a volunteer operation. Then I stumbled across the Open Access Community Investment Program (OACIP), an actual, on-the-ground example of what I started to think of as a mission-aligned funding exchange. The idea behind the then-new OACIP was that the program would manage all those pesky logistics: vetting, invoicing, and the ability to ‘invest’ across a number of journals. OACIP was, in effect, a marketplace, albeit of a peculiar kind: a platform for mission-driven libraries to connect with and pledge direct support for nonprofit, no-fee OA journals.[14] This was the collective funding model I had been day-dreaming about. I reached out to Sharla Lair, an OA strategist at LYRASIS, the big North American library consortium, without concealing my giddiness. Yes, I hoped that History of Media Studies might join the program’s second round, but more than anything I was excited about the model.
I soon heard rumors about a similar initiative, this one devoted to books. It is a small OA world: many of my peers at scholar-led presses, it turns out, were already involved via a foundation and government-funded project to boost open-access monographs.[15] One of the project’s initiatives was to create an Open Book Collective (OBC), where librarians and other funders could underwrite solo publishers but also, crucially, bundles of like-minded presses.[16] The burdens of vetting, invoicing, and reporting, as with the OACIP case, were offloaded to the exchange itself and funded by a modest tax on the direct funding pledged to publishers. It was that same summer in 2021 when I heard about the nascent OBC effort, as well as a German-language project with similar goals. The confluence of all these projects had me identifying a common match-making model of collective funding, centering on ‘platforms that connect fee-free OA publishers and infrastructure stewards with mission-aligned patrons in the library and foundation worlds’. As I elaborated in a 2021 essay,
These markets, crucially, are not mediated by ‘price’ alone, but instead by alignments in values. Libraries and funders, in other words, furnish direct support to nonprofit, community-led publishers and services on web-based matching platforms that double as fiscal clearinghouses. In this model, funders and recipients alike elaborate mission criteria, with the recipients supplying additional structured information on scope, governance, licensing, and related information.[17]
Hence the mission-aligned funding exchange (MAFE). To me, this development was far more than a potential path to sustainability for mediastudies.press. I had, after all, founded the press in large part to learn about publishing in an on-the-ground, ISBN-and-all sense. The press was and is a means to an end: to gain knowledge by acquaintance rather than by description alone, to draw on Bertrand Russell’s old contrast.[18] From the beginning, my OA interests have centered on the problem of collective funding. The MAFE is the future, I came to believe – and with anticipatory excitement. Thus the chance to participate in the journal-oriented OACIP (in 2021-2022) and the book-centric OBC (since 2023) was a thrilling enactment of my open-authorship values, with the promise of still-more knowledge-by-acquaintance.
Challenges and the future
The press has survived its first five years. We have nine books and three journal volumes under our belt, with four books slated for publication in 2024 – a publication pace that suits the ‘scaling small’ philosophy common to the ScholarLed presses.[19] In 2022, founding board member David W. Park took on the associate director role. We are particularly excited to publish, in English translation, Mariano Zarowsky’s pioneering Del Laboratorio Chileno a la Comunicación-Mundo: Un Itinerario Intelectual de Armand Mattelart (2013), with the support of a competitive grant from an Argentinian government program.[20] The Zarowsky project brings together many of our major commitments: to a broadened history of the field, to Latin America in particular, and to direct funding.
Our greatest challenge is, fittingly, interwoven with our mission. As I have described, the core conviction driving the establishment of the press was that a collective funding model could work – one that charged neither readers nor authors. We have had great and promising success on the book and journal sides, thanks to the OBC and OACIP. Yet mediastudies.press remains a volunteer effort. We pay our (superb) copy editor, translators, and (the rare) designer fairly. But the core operational labor of producing books and running the organisation is unrenumerated. This is not a point of principle, even though arguments for the virtues of volunteer labor in scholar-led publishing have some appeal. It is really about resources: we have to pay our memberships, software costs, and the copy editing, to keep the proverbial lights on. Covering those and related costs leaves almost nothing to spare, with the result that the other work, conducted by Park and I, remains donated.
That arrangement is probably not sustainable – not for mediastudies.press, nor for other once and future scholar-led initiatives. In my own case, I have stepped down from a tenured academic post in part to win time for the press. Even so, however, I have had to prioritise a pair of paid initiatives, leaving me in a similar place: without enough time leftover to move books through production.
The fact is that the income generated by the Open Book Collective, while indispensable, is not yet enough to cover modest-rate, part-time pay for the director and associate director. That may change: the OBC is brand-new, and still rolling out its outreach to libraries and other funders. The effort has already delivered the basic proof, that mission-aligned collective funding can work in practice.
One obvious question is whether the funding model can scale. It is not the right question though, since of course the model can scale – the very idea is predicated on bundling, vetting, and a fiscal hub. A mission-aligned funding exchange is a practical mechanism for connecting nonprofit funders with nonprofit publishers, a community-governed coordination tool for a system with many participants.
The real question is political will. If the scholarly publishing system is hurtling toward open access, who will pay for it? There are two choices, in effect: authors or direct support for publishing. Hinging authorship on the ability to pay is a bald injustice. If we are committed to furnishing open access for readers and authors alike, we need to push for what is the only fair way forward: collective funding. Recent developments in Europe and Latin America furnish a glint of promise for an APC-free future. The big commercial publishers will, however, fight to retain their obscene OA profits. The choice of which path to take will, ultimately, fall to universities, scholars, and the public who fund both. In that respect mediastudies.press is a political statement. Together with its scholar-led peers, we hope to demonstrate, in miniature, that a different publishing world is possible.
Globalising and enhancing an open project: The Media History Digital Library in the 2020s
by Eric Hoyt and Kelley Conway
Digital technology, as we are often reminded, works on a binary logic. Is the transistor switch on or off? One or zero? Open or closed? Open access digital humanities projects, however, are not binary. They exist on a spectrum.
Openness takes different forms and shapes. When it comes to open access publishing, we use colors and stones as metaphors to describe that spectrum – green, blue, gold, platinum, and diamond (of which this journal is an example). When it comes to interactive and collection-oriented open projects, we often use more direct evaluative language. Do users actually like it and use it? Does the interface work well? Are the collections comprehensive? How could the resource be more accessible and helpful? How could the interface and collections be improved? And, for projects based in the US, how can they be more global? The constant opportunity and challenge of leading an open project is that no matter how good it is, there is always room to make it better.
In this essay, we share our efforts over the past five years to enhance an already open project: the Media History Digital Library (MHDL; https://mediahist.org), a collaborative initiative dedicated to digitising books and magazines from the histories of film, broadcasting, and recorded sound for broad public access. During the 2010s, the MHDL made a positive impact on the field of cinema and media studies by digitising more than two-million pages of historic publications and making them openly accessible, downloadable, and searchable. Yet the project also had weaknesses, particularly in its data model, user interface, and lack of non-English language publications. To address these challenges, we applied for and obtained an ACLS Digital Extension Grant – a wonderful source of funding available at the time for projects that were doing good work but could expand much further. In the case study that follows, we describe the MHDL background and history; the improvements we sought to make; and what we achieved, failed to achieve, and learned through pursuing those efforts during a global pandemic. It is the story of one particular open access digital humanities project that we believe can offer lessons for other projects seeking to improve and become more open.
Background: Media History Digital Library, strengths and weaknesses
Prior to the arrival of MHDL, scholars had long utilised trade papers such as Moving Picture World and Film Daily to research the development of the media industries and their impact upon audiences and culture. Yet access to those sources remained limited; scholars depended upon incomplete and low-quality microfilm facsimiles. The majority of film and broadcasting magazines (which had never been transferred to microfilm) were only available at a handful of institutions; none of the microfilm nor print copies were fully text-searchable. Instead, researchers had to turn page by page to look for items relevant to their research questions.
In 2009, film historian David Pierce sought to improve this research landscape by founding MHDL. Pierce knew the breadth of publications that existed, and he knew the institutions and private collectors who possessed their original copies (not simply microfilm). He found generous individuals willing to fund the digitisation of important magazines and borrowed from the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Pacific Film Archive, and private collectors. Pierce also benefitted from 25 years of experience investigating the copyright status of books and films. Whereas most Hollywood movies from the 1920s through the 1950s were still under copyright protection, most of the trade papers and fan magazines of this period were in the public domain. This has enabled MHDL to share its collections on an open access basis without a single copyright lawsuit.
In 2011, Eric Hoyt joined David Pierce in leading MHDL, and they collaborated with Wendy Hagenmaier on building a website (http://mediahistoryproject.org) and digitising 200,000 pages of movie magazines. The Internet Archive agreed to serve as the scanning vendor and data hosting service, granting MHDL its own sub-collection.[21] When Hoyt accepted a position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he brought the software development projects he was working on with him. In 2013, Hoyt and his team at UW-Madison launched Lantern (http://lantern.mediahist.org), a search platform for MHDL that enabled users to run full text queries (Figure 1).[22] In 2014, Hoyt and Charles Acland at Concordia University received a Digging into Data grant, sponsored by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (United States) and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), to build the Arclight app (http://search.projectarclight.org) – a data analytics platform that searches for trends across the MHDL collection.[23]MHDL platform improvement initiatives also received funding from the Mary Pickford Foundation and UW-Madison. In 2017, MHDL reached two important milestones: expanding its collection to more than two-million pages and fully moving to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with David Pierce stepping down as MHDL director to focus on his duties at the Library of Congress.
Fig. 1: Screenshot of lantern, 2013 version.
For all its accomplishments, MHDL was limited in its ability to fully engage its users due to its data model, user interface, and dearth of digitised content published outside the United States. Consider the case of a user in the year 2019 wanting to research the history of cinema one century earlier. If the user searched the MHDL collection to explore the single year of 1919, they would encounter more than 30,000 pages of books and magazines about American cinema. Moving Picture World, Photoplay, Film Daily, and other periodicals in the collection chronicle important developments within the US film industry, such as the founding of the studio United Artists by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin, and D.W. Griffith. These magazines also document cinema as a social institution. State censorship laws, public health concerns related to the influenza pandemic, and the architecture of racially-segregated theaters are among the issues the trade papers discussed in 1919.
What the search for 1919 would not return, however, were magazines in any language other than English. The perspectives of the German, Italian, and French film industries, struggling to rebuild following the devastation of the First World War, were absent. Similarly missing were the voices of movie fans in Mexico and India, who helped transform Douglas Fairbanks into a global movie star. The user may have also been frustrated that some intriguing 1919 articles about film screenings at US churches and factories were difficult to view due to broken hyperlinks and an unwieldy data model. For a resource that promised illumination with its platforms Lantern and Arclight, there was still far too much that remained in the shadows.
Strategies to enhance and globalise MHDL
To address these shortcomings and enhance MHDL, we applied to the ACLS Digital Extension Grant program, which was ideally suited for our project and needs. Supported by the Mellon Foundation, the ACLS Digital Extension Grant sought to take projects that were already doing good work and make them stronger, more effective, and extend their reach to a broader public. Our proposal to ACLS requested funding to support a range of initiatives, from database design to collections development to hosting public workshops.
We knew we needed to implement a new database and data model. One tradeoff of the low overhead of MHDL had been a data model that was decentralised and messy. Whereas the best practices of database design emphasise ‘staying DRY’ (an acronym for ‘don’t repeat yourself’), MHDL had the same data and metadata inconsistently repeated across the Internet Archive, a searchable Solr index, HTML documents, and XML files. This limitation resulted in an inefficient workflow and, more problematically, broken links and missing thumbnails for our users. Furthermore, MHDL had no API (application programming interface), thus limiting the possibilities for interoperability and reuse. By implementing a new data model and database, we believed that we could build a foundation that would truly enhance accessibility and support MHDL and its users for the next decade.
We also knew that we needed an improved user interface, one that automatically populated information from the original to the new database and provided users with a more integrated and cohesive online experience. At the time of our ACLS proposal, users of MHDL found themselves moving across several visually distinctive interfaces, each with separate URLs (e.g. mediahistoryproject.org, lantern.mediahist.org, projectarclight.org, and archive.org). Many felt confused. The new interface improved this situation by implementing a standard color scheme and visual design and using mediahist.org as the root domain from which all other sub-domains are generated. Additionally, the new interface included a customised version of the BookReader – the Javascript-based software developed by the Internet Archive that gives users the feeling of turning the pages of a book. All in all, we wanted to make sure that the user experience improved alongside the database enhancements.
The most ambitious component of the proposal, however, was to globalise the MHDL collections. As the earlier example about the year 1919 illustrated, the MHDL collection of books and magazines related to film history derived almost entirely from US publications. This limited the collection’s research potential for the study of national cinemas and the transnational exchange of films and filmmakers.
To address those gaps, we proposed the creation of the Global Cinema History Task Force – a group of a dozen experts who could identify important non-US film publications and investigate their locations and copyright statuses. The Task Force members possessed expertise in Portuguese, Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian, French, Italian, German, and Hindi languages, cultures, and cinemas.[24] Although we recognised that not all the works identified by Task Force members would be able to be scanned for reasons of availability and copyright, we were confident that we would be able to add at least several international film magazines to the collection. We also looked forward to hosting the group in Madison for a symposium – a chance to share findings, discuss important publications, and offer suggestions for how other scholars could approach the complex webs of international copyright laws, archives, and digitisation workflows. We were delighted when we learned that we had received the grant.
Implementing the work plan during a pandemic
Ten weeks later, the world turned upside down. We were forced to cancel the proposed symposium. A global pandemic is not the ideal time to launch an ambitious worldwide scanning initiative. Yet at the same time, this challenge reminded us how important online access initiatives are. Researchers around the world were reaching out to express gratitude for the sources they could access freely – from home – on MHDL. And they wanted to know: could we add more?
With the typical process for sourcing, scanning, and uploading new material, the answer would have been no. However, we quickly realised that an opportunity lay in the digital collections of other organisations. Although creating new scans of physical magazines would need to wait until the libraries and archives reopened, there were hundreds of thousands of digital image files from movie magazines that already lived within computer storage environments. If the individuals and/or organisations responsible for scanning them were willing to share them with us and grant permission, we could put these digital copies through our post-production and indexing systems and make them accessible within MHDL. Even if the image resolution was lower than what we typically worked with, the facsimile of a historical magazine was better than nothing at all.
Utilising this model of consent, file sharing, and post-production, we added hundreds of thousands of pages of non-English-language movie magazines to MHDL. The biggest of these projects involved the German film industry’s first two trade papers: Der Kinematograph and Die Lichtbild-Bühne. Years earlier, film scholar Michael Cowan had commissioned the digitisation of these publications from the Mikrofilmarchiv der deutschsprachigen Presse to help advance his research. Now, as a member of the Global Cinema History Task Force, Cowan generously shared the digital files with us and worked out an arrangement with the Mikrofilmarchiv der deutschsprachigen Presse to enable us to utilise the files. The MHDL project assistants then spent hundreds of hours cropping, adjusting, and grouping the digital page scans, as well as entering the descriptive metadata for the volumes and posting them to the Internet Archive. The end result was 50,000 openly accessible pages of Der Kinematograph, along with 26,000 of Die Lichtbild-Bühne.
We followed this same model for other publications and national cinemas. Italian cinema scholar and Task Force member Daniela Treveri Gennari facilitated a productive collaboration between MHDL and Biblioteca Luigi Chiarini del Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC). As a result, we were able to add six Italian film periodicals to MHDL: Lo schermo, Film d’oggi, Cinema illustrazione, Bianco e Nero, Star, and La critica cinematografica. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh, Belinda Qian He, and Darrell Davis all generously shared scanned Chinese movie magazine files with us, and an anonymous donor transferred the digital files of Setāreh-ye Sinemā (Cinema Star). All of these magazines are now searchable within MHDL, and several of them are analysed in a forthcoming book we are editing.
Alongside the post-production and indexing of previously scanned magazines, we sought out new collaborative digitisation arrangements with libraries and archives. Three of our Task Force members – Rielle Navitski, Laura Isabel Serna, and Nicolas Poppe – are experts in Latin American film history. They knew from their research that the New York Public Library (NYPL) held an impressive physical collection of Spanish language movie magazines. We began talking with the staff about ways we could work together to scan them once the library fully reopened. We identified three Spanish language film magazines, all published within the US, as being out-of-copyright and excellent candidates for digitisation: Cinelandia (1924-1947), Teatro al día (1936-1939), and Empresario Internacional (1940-1941) (Fig 2). We made arrangements with NYPL to scan all three. We were also pleased to collaborate with the Cinémathèque Française on the scanning of Le Courrier Cinématographique (1911-1937), an early and important French film industry trade paper.
Fig. 2: Cover image of Empresario Internacional.
Fig. 3: Cover image of Le Courrier Cinématographique.
As these magazine scans reached us via hard drives and online transfer protocols, we were pleased to have a new relational database and search index installed and running on our servers to store the data. Thanks to the tremendous efforts of our database developer Sam Hansen, MHDL had finally gone DRY: the metadata entered within the Internet Archive uploads now automatically populated across the MHDL MySQL database and Solr index (which Lantern and Arclight both query). Our interface developer, Ben Pettis, overhauled the visual design of the MHDL website and Lantern interface so that these backend database developments could be fully harnessed by users, who now had a more cohesive experience working with the sites as well (Fig. 4). Additionally, we used the database and interface enhancements as an opportunity to implement a new API, enabling for the interoperability and reuse of MHDL data and metadata.[25] By the end of the ACLS grant funding period, we had tripled the number of non-English-language digitised magazines within the MHDL collections and transformed the project’s database and interfaces, for the benefit of users and the project’s long-term sustainability.
Fig. 4: Screen shot of revamped MHDL interface.
Reflections, takeaways, and conclusion
We learned a great deal from our efforts to globalise and enhance the Media History Digital Library. One of our biggest takeaways was the importance of involving scholars in the process. Global Cinema History Task Force members directed us toward important magazines to digitise – and, in some cases, took the lead in establishing scanning cooperation arrangements based on professional relationships they had developed over many years. Because of the efforts of Paul S. Moore, Daniela Treveri Gennari, and Belinda Qian He in facilitating archival partnerships, the MHDL collections of Canadian, Italian, and Chinese movie magazines have dramatically increased. All three of the abovementioned film historians have also contributed chapters for Global Movie Magazine Networks, the book we are co-editing that is forthcoming from the University of California Press open access Luminos program. The success of our project has hinged on collaborations, especially collaborations that blend together the paradigms of basic research and applied research.
Another lesson we learned from the process is that the methods for carrying out magazine scanning need to take place in the manner most comfortable to the holding institutions. Our original idea to have archives ship materials to us to scan in Madison, Wisconsin did not work very well. MHDL can provide funding, guidance, and post-production support, but we cannot and should not dictate where the scanning takes place. The magazines are fragile and rare, and they belong to the holding institutions, which should decide where to scan them.
We also learned from our experience with the Cinémathèque Française in scanning Le Courrier Cinématographique that such projects tend to require support from multiple partners. Our partners in the Periodical Department at the Cinémathèque Française helped us identify the scanning projects already underway at other archives in France and provided a short list of publications for us to consider for this initiative. When COVID-19 made it impossible for us to travel to Paris to undertake the scanning of Le Courrier Cinématographique, our partners in Paris identified a trustworthy service provider who could provide high-quality scans. The UW-Madison Center for French Interdisciplinary Studies and the Communications Arts Partners group stepped forward with generous grants. When we struggled to procure a required tax document, the French Embassy in Washington, DC helped us communicate our needs to French accountants. We have been fortunate to collaborate with a host of individuals and institutions who understood the importance of this project.
Despite our best efforts, some nations and regions remain better represented within MHDL than others. Due to rights issues, material scarcity, funding limitations, and logistical challenges, we cannot digitise everything we would like to make freely and openly available. Our forthcoming book attempts to level the field by shedding light on magazines that are now freely available online, alongside magazines that are not digitised and difficult to access within the US. This, too, has been a lesson learned through the project: sharing research about magazines via open access scholarly publishing can help offset the many gaps and limitations in attempting to scan historic magazines for open access.
In closing, we would like to encourage more open access digital humanities projects and more funding agencies to invest resources into enhancing and globalising the work they are doing. The ACLS Digital Extension Grant program was discontinued the year after we received the award. While we will always be grateful for the support of ACLS, and we applaud the other important funding initiatives ACLS is currently leading, we cannot help but observe that there are a dwindling number of resources available in the US for the work described above. An open project can never be fully complete, but it can be diminished or even shut down due to lack of funding or care. Let us then move in the other direction: taking open projects that are already doing good work and challenging them to grow, improve, and have a more profound impact.
Authors
Eric Hoyt is the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the intersections between media history and the digital humanities. He is the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and Media History Digital Library. His work has received support from the NEH, ACLS, NHPRC, and IMLS. He is the co-editor of three open access anthologies: The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities (2016), Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography (2021), and Global Movie Magazine Networks (with Kelley Conway; forthcoming in 2024). His most recent book, Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (2022), was published open access by the University of California Press and received the 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award Special Jury Prize for an exemplary work in the field of recorded performance.
Kelley Conway is Professor in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Specialising in the history of French cinema, she is the author of Chanteuse in the City (2004) and Agnès Varda (2015). She is co-principal investigator on the Global Cinema History Task Force of the Media History Digital Library (http://mediahist.org) and is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Global Movie Magazine Networks (with Eric Hoyt; forthcoming in 2024).
Jefferson Pooley is director of mediastudies.press. He is affiliated professor of media and communication at Muhlenberg College and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on the history of film, media, and communication studies.
References
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[1] See e.g. Pooley 2015, 2016.
[2] The big five for-profit firms are: Elsevier (parent: RELX Group), Springer Nature (parent: Holtzbrinck), Taylor & Francis (parent: Informa), Wiley, and SAGE. See Larivière & Haustein & Mongeon 2015 for an overview of the five publishers’ rapid capture of most of the scholarly publishing market.
[3] Chan et al 2002. See Suber 2011.
[4] BioMed Central 2001.
[5] Public Library of Science 2004.
[6] Pooley 2019.
[7] Pooley 2021.
[8] ScholarLed 2018. See Barnes 2018. For a particularly lucid and detailed case study of scholar-led book publishing, see Joy & Van Gergen Oei 2023.
[9] For more on the decision to switch to PubPub, see Pooley 2022. Disclosure: since autumn 2023, I have served as a Fellow at Knowledge Futures, helping to support the next major version of PubPub.
[10] mediastudies.press 2019
[11] The founding board members were myself, David W. Park, John L. Sullivan, Peter Simonson, and Tim Elfenbein. In 2023 we welcomed Cheryll Ruth Soriano and Juliette De Maeyer, with Sullivan cycling off the board.
[12] Peter Simonson, a co-editor of History of Media Studies, has spearheaded the journal’s commitment to geographic and other kinds of diversity, particularly in regards to Spanish-language and Latin American outreach.
[13] Park & Pooley & Simonson 2022.
[14] Rosen et al 2022.
[15] The initiative is Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM), funded by the Arcadia Fund and Research England. See Barnes 2019.
[16] Synder & Fathallah 2023.
[17] Pooley 2021.
[18] Russell 1905, p. 479.
[19] See Adema & Moore 2021.
[20] Zaworsky 2013.
[21] The Media History Digital Library sub-collection on the Internet Archive can be accessed at http://archive.org/details/mediahistory.
[22] For more on the development of Lantern and the Media History Digital Library, see Hoyt 2017.
[23] Hoyt & Hughes & Acland 2016.
[24] The members of the Global Cinema History Task Force are: Kaveh Askari, Maria Belodubrovskaya, Kelley Conway, Michael Cowan, Darrell Davis, Vincent Fröhlich, Rachel Gabara, Daniela Treveri Gennari, Belinda Qian He, Eric Hoyt, Chung-kang Kim, Darshana Mini, Paul S. Moore, Debashree Mukherjee, Rielle Navitski, Nicolas Poppe, Laura Isabel Serna, Eric Smoodin, James Udden, Naoki Yamamoto, and Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh. We would also like to acknowledge the partnership and contributions of the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage project team, led by Gabriela Baeza Ventura, Lorena Gauthereau, and Carolina A. Villarroel.
[25] Documentation on how to utilise the Media History Digital Library API is available at https://lantern.mediahist.org/api.