Reveal Digital: innovative library crowdfunding model for open access digital collections

Editor's Notes

1. One of the benefits of doing a webinar versus a conference panel is there is no travel involved which opens the spectrum of potential speakers to a much larger pool. In our case, it would be nearly impossible to pull this group of speakers together physically, and I am delighted they were able to participate virtually. Thorne, Peter and Tessa represent each of the major stakeholders in Reveal Digital’s model and the Independent Voices project. I think you will appreciate hearing their perspectives on what we are doing. Before you hear from them you will need some context to understand Reveal Digital as an organization and our first project, Independent Voices.
2. Reveal Digital is an open access publisher. It may be even more appropriate to describe us as a facilitator of library publishing programs. Everything Reveal Digital does begins with special collections areas within academic libraries, historical societies and other archives. We work with these groups to define and scope ideas for new digital collections. Our focus is on humanities content, and, at this point primarily text-based, serials content. We anticipate future collections will include different content types and media. Once a project is defined, special collections libraries and archives provide the source material for digitization. They in turn receive back the digital files of their material, rights cleared, to do with whatever they wish. Rights clearance…Once a project is defined we at Reveal Digital do the detective work to identify the rights holders for publications we want to include in a collection and approach them to seek open access rights. In return for permission, we provide the rights holder with high resolution images of their publications to do with whatever they wish.
3. The final piece of the puzzle are the Collection Development librarians. Collection Development librarians typically control the spending libraries do to acquire new content. More and more, collection development librarians are also determining which open access programs to invest in. We approach collection development librarians to ask them to contribute funding to cover the cost of developing collections. These librarians either evaluate the request on the basis of spending money to acquire new and needed content or they evaluate the request in light of their strategy to invest in open access programs. As you can tell already, this is a highly collaborative effort not only between many different institutions, but between different groups within the same library. Reveal Digital is the hub that provides the expertise to facilitate this collaboration, ensuring projects move forward and are sustained over time. The end result of this collaboration are open access digital collections that support research in the humanities with a particular focus on 20th century society. This diagram above could just as easily reflect the business model of traditional publishing. So you may be asking how is Reveal Digital different.
4. The answer lies mostly in the costs. Open Access does not mean free. Publishing of any kind, whether traditional or open access, can be a costly undertaking. Through Reveal Digital’s open access model we aim to be completely transparent about costs and our goal is to simply recover those costs. Our approach differs from traditional publishers who expect to earn 60 – 70% profit and generate a revenue stream for many years to come. In addition, we claim no ownership of the content we digitize. The digital assets belong to the rights holders and the libraries and archive that own the original source material
5. Our approach benefits all the different stakeholders in numerous ways. The most obvious benefits may be to the libraries who hold the undigitized source material. Under our model the source library owns the digital files we create for a project and they retain complete control over those files and any future use. A source libraries content is digitized at no direct expense to them and the content is copyright cleared-an effort most libraries do not have the resources to undertake themselves. Less obvious, but still important is that the content from one library is aggregated with the content from many others. This ensures the content will be more discoverable and more useful than if a single title or smaller collection resided in isolation in its own.
6. Maybe the biggest question in your mind is why would a library pay for something that will ultimately be open access. Many libraries recognize that if they do not support an open access collection of content of value to them, a commercial publisher is likely to provide the content at a much higher price, potentially 30 – 50% higher price. It is in a library’s economic interest to participate. Funding libraries get immediate, early access to digitized collections before they are made open access Libraries are increasingly supporting text and data mining project requests by providing large corpora of content. Funding libraries can request text and metadata downloads from Independent Voices at no charge. MARC records and usage statistics are provided only to funding libraries, aiding discovery and collection analysis Funding libraries are able to nominate content from their own collections that may not have been included in the original scope
7. Rights holders also benefit. It is the rare publication archive to which access can be sold to earn enough money to cover the cost of digitization. By participating in our projects, publications will be digitized at no cost to the rights holder and they will receive the digitized files to do with what they wish. Also, by being included in a larger project, there content is actually more likely to be discovered and used. Scholars and Researchers are the ultimate beneficiaries of Reveal Digital’s model. They will have access to more content in more places in the world than under traditional publishing models.
8. Now that you have a conceptual idea of what Reveal Digital is doing, let’s focus on our first project, Independent Voices. Independent Voices is a collection of 1960s, 70s and 80s alternative press publications primarily (at this point) from the U.S. and Canada. It currently contains 415 thousand pages. When complete, it will contain approximately 750,000 pages from 1,000 titles. Most of this content has never been digitized. Alternative presses were not widely collected by libraries at the time of their publication. It is rare for any one library to have an entire run of any of these titles and no library collected all of the titles we are bringing together in this collection. By collaborating with many libraries, we are able to create complete runs of titles in a digital format and provide a more wholistic perspective of the era than has ever been done.
9. Independent Voices is composed of nine series, covering publications that came out of the major social movements in North America at the time. You can see the list of eight of the nine series here. The Right-wing press series is not currently listed because we are just beginning the copyright clearance work on this series, so no digitization has been done yet. There are three minority press series in Independent Voices, Black American, Latino and Native American. The Campus and community underground series features mainly newspapers that were published as alternative to mainstream campus or local newspapers. The feminism and LGBT series are closely related, featuring periodicals that were published as part of the second-wave of feminism and the emerging lesbian and gay empowerment movements. The GI underground presses series features short-run, low tech newsletters that were published on military bases around the world during the Vietnam War. These newsletters were published mostly by enlisted men or Gis and were quite subversive in their time. Then there are the literary magazines or Little Magazines. Independent Voices contains the largest collection by far of digitized Little Magazines. It is a real treasure trove. This content may seem out of context, but it really isn’t. The Little magazines reflected the social movements of the time mostly through experimental and avant garde poetry. Independent Voices is a must-have for anyone studying contemporary poetry and its social context.
10. A full description of the collection, including title lists may be found on Reveal Digital’s website. On this site you will also see exactly how much it will cost to complete the collection as originally scoped and where we stand on fundraising. We are within $100,000 of the project’s cost recovery threshold, which is great news. Any amount contributed beyond the goal will enable us to expand the scope of the collection, which Paola will talk about in a few minutes.
11. Also on this site you will find a list of libraries that have provided funding so far. You will see 98 libraries on this list, including University of Sussex, the first UK library to join the project. Support for our model and the Independent Voices project is widespread across the U.S. and Canada. You will see many libraries you would expect, like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, University of California system libraries. You will also see many small liberal arts colleges you may never have heard of like Allegheny College, Reed College and Kalamazoo College.
12. Equally important is the involvement of libraries who hold the source material we need for the collection. So far 37 libraries, archives and individuals have provided source material for digitization. Without these partners, the collection would not exist. With this background I turn the presentation over to our three speakers. We’ll begin with Thorne Dreyer who was a driving force at one of the most important alternative presses of the Era called The Rag.
13. Thank you, Thorne. Next up is Peter Berg who represent special libraries, source libraries and Michigan State is also a generous funding library.
14. Thank you, Peter! Finally, let’s hear from Tessa Jordan who represents those for whom we are ultimately creating collections like Independent Voices, the scholars and researchers.