The following links include individuals and organizations devoted to open access publishing (OA), articles discussing the pros and cons of OA, and directories of resources related to OA.

• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing.
• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
• Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals.
• Open Access Overview by Peter Suber.
• Directory of Open Access Journals.
• Open Archives Initiative.
• Open Access Webliography by Adrian K. Ho and Charles W. Bailey, Jr..
• Timeline of the Open Access Movement by Peter Suber.
• Public Knowledge Project: Publications.
• John Willinsky, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (2005).

Web 2.0

Ever since the term “Web 2.0” has emerged, debates have ensued over its meanings, implications, and relative usefulness. It’s been loved and hated, but certainly not ignored (at least by most of the web development community).

• Web 2.0 for Designers by Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter. Digital Web Magazine, May 4, 2005..
• What is Web 2.0? by Tim O’Reilly. September 30, 2005.
• del.icio.us/tag/Web2.0 – Results at del.icio.us for the tag “Web2.0”
• Web 2.0 by Paul Graham. November 2005.
• Web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman. A List Apart, January 16, 2006.

The Semantic Web

The following documents and websites provide discussions on the meanings and implications of the Semantic Web.

• Semantic Web. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia.
• SemanticWeb.org.
• W3C Semantic Web.
• James Hendler, Tim Berners-Lee, and Eric Miller. “Integrating Applicaitons on the Semantic Web” Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan 122 (10) October 2002: 676-680.
• Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila. “The Semantic Web”. ScientificAmerican.com, May 2001.
• Edd Dumbill. The Semantic Web: A Primer. XML.com, November 1, 2000.

What is the Semantic Web? It’s essentially “a web of data” joined together by “ common formats” and coding to show how “data related to real world objects.” Tim Berners-Lee outlines the basic problem when he states that “one of the major obstacles” of the Web as “information space” is that “ most information on the Web is designed for human consumption” and not machine consumption. At present, a vast majority of electronic history scholarship, while freely accessible, are created for human-human consumption and not created with semantics in mind. My post on Semantic Markup and Microformats, for instance, addresses this issue in a specific way.

How, then, might the Semantic Web help with open access publishing? For me, the two work hand-in-hand. The Semantic Web is about making information meaningful and easier to find, while OA strives to give everyone access to the latest knowledge products. OA advocates the need to make scholarship more readily available to everyone. Semantics invariably aid in findability and usability. The Dublin Core Metadata intiative, for instance, “provides simple standards to facilitate the finding, sharing and management of information.” In the end, the Semantic Web helps to make OA possible.

Much of the work to provide semantic, open-access tools for academics is already underway. John Willinsky and others at the Public Knowledge Project provides Open Journal Systems. Open Journal Systems provides publishers with a open-source program to manage an electronic journal. Beyond scholarly pursuits, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank uses a flexible back-end that allows archivists to collect information from site visitors and uses Dublic Core metadata to organize and present archived objects. (See Sheila’s post, “Not the Same Old Archive”). I’m currently working on two projects that focus on scholarly and educational content management. Josh Greenberg and I are building what is tentatively called Wordpress Courseware, a content management system for higher education courses that integrates blogging, dynamic syllabus and calendar creation, and bibliographic management into one package. I am also working on a simple platform to encourage academic self-publishing that combines blogging with the self-publication of articles. Both of these projects use the open-source, freely-available Wordpress blogging system. Both also rest on the idea that our work as educators and researchers should be open and accessible.

The title of our presentation embodies the gist of my thoughts on digital history. We should move the past forward. We should be forward-thinkers about the past. It is no longer efficient put content on the web with the mentality that “if you build it, they will come.” We, as academics working for the public, should go to the public by making our work more usable in a variety of ways. We should enable our audiences to use our work in different contexts. Our work should adhere to web standards, semantics, and accessibity. Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, metadata standards, folksonomy, RSS involve thinking, not about how people can use information today, but how they can use it tomorrow and further into the future.

Anyone who has worked with HTML or XHTML has probably had, at some time or another, questions about how to mark up a specific piece of content. Especially when dealing with older documents that don’t always conform to modern publishing conventions. Even then, HTML and XHTML are significantly limited when it comes to marking up documents in meaningful ways.

One way that markup falls short with regard to academic publishing is the way that citations (footnotes or endnotes) are coded (or, in lots of cases, not coded). Take, as an example, a citation from an article in the open-access journal International Journal of Naval History:


<p class="MsoEndnoteText" style="text-align: justify; line-height: 150%; word-spacing: 0; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><a name="_edn2"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></a><a href="#_ednref2" title>
        <div id="edn2">
          <p style="line-height: 150%; word-spacing: 0; margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bookmark: _edn2" class="MsoEndnoteReference">[2]</span></font></a><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language:EN-GB">
          See Gary Weir, <i>An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers,
          Scientists, and the Ocean Environment</i> (College Station, 2001),
          270-6; 334-5.</span><o:p>
          </o:p>
          </font>
        </div>


The Microsoft-specific markup aside, there is no markup indicating the different information included in a citation. A much cleaner, more semantically-coded footnote that would conform to microformat standards might look like this:


<ol class="footnotes">
  <li class="citation" id="edn2"><span class="author fn">See Gary Weir</span>, <span class="title">An Ocean in Common: American Naval Officers, Scientists, and the Ocean Environment</span> (<span class="location">College Station</span>, <span class="date year">2001</span), <span class="pages">270-6; 334-5.</span>
</li>
</ol>


I say “might” because there is no proposed microformat for scholarly citations. I chose my format for several reasons. First, it makes sense to mark up footnotes in an ordered list <ol> because that’s what it is: an ordered, sequential list. The number shows up automatically because ordered lists are, by default, displayed using numbered bullets. The “look and feel” of the citation can easily be changed (and should be changed) using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS. I mark up the author’s name, the book title, the publisher’s location, the date of publication, and the pages used by indicating a class attribute for each. This goes beyond simply using an <i> tag to italicize the book title. The <i> tag is merely presentational; It only italicizes the text, and you can italicize any text. But we want to do more than italicize the title. We want to indicate that it is, in fact, a title of a book. Moreover, we’ve indicated what text is the author’s name and other information, thus providing more meaning to what the text represents.

But why, you might ask, should this matter? Isn’t the fact that it looks at works alright the most important thing? My answer is emphatically, no, it does indeed matter. On an ever-growing web of information, where content is constantly competing with other content for the attention of user, where findability is currency, semantic, meaningful, human and machine-readable content will flourish. Semantic markup makes for better accessibility for all users, will make it easier for academic work to be converted and used in RSS and other XML-based tools, and will help create a uniform standard by which academics should publish scholarly work on the web. Take any 20 electronic journals on the web, and I’ll bet none of them use the same markup for citations.Using the markup in used above only slightly changes how the citation displays and works in a web browser. But my changes are more concerned with enabling people to take that content and use in in a myriad of contexts, “future-proofing” in effect so that we may use this citation in other applcations and display it in other ways. Standardization of scholarly citation on the web might, for instance, enable someone to create a tool that can search for how frequently a particular work is cited and aggregate a list of publications that cite a particular work. In an academic world where the influence of one’s scholarship is important, wouldn’t this be useful?

In a previous post I argued that the tools we use should be “invisible” in an effort to bring more emphasis on the content being presented. One way RSS can do that is allow readers of a journal to keep up-to-date about its recent publications without actually having to go to the site. Furthermore, it stressed the Web 2.0 mantra that “content is king” by giving readers a variety of options as to how they access and absorb the content from a journal.

Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter provide a good explanation for why RSS is an effective tool. In Web 2.0 for Designers, MacManus and Porter demonstrate that RSS encourages sites to adopt semantic markup, share content freely and easily, make sure that content (not ownership) is key, and give users more control over how they access content. For MacManus and Porter, Web 2.0 encompases six themes:

1. Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
2. Providing Web services (moving away from place)
3. Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
4. Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
5. Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
6. Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)

RSS is an essential component of Web 2.0, one that encourages more meaningful document structure and giving users the freedom to access content when and how they want.

A few subscription-based E-Journals do offer RSS feeds. All of Cambridge University Press’ Cambridge Journals Online offer RSS feeds. But because access to their journals is still subscription-based, the feeds only contain the titles of the latest articles in a particular journal. No full-text. No abstract. No summary. No keywords. While this is a step in the right direction, we need more, much bigger steps.

In contrast, imagine that lots of journals offer RSS feeds of their most recent articles (like most blogs), feeds for specific topics or keywords (like “segregation” “filth”, “print culture”, or “collecting”), or feeds for specific authors, historiographical schools, or any number of possibilities. All of these can then be imported seamlessly into a users feed reader and, by simply opening up that feed reader, the user can check to see if anything new has been published and can read those new publications instantly, without having to search for each, specific article.

This is entirely possible to accomplish now. Del.icio.us already offers RSS for specific tags, for specific users, and for specific tags by specific users. Here, in our presentation, you can subscribe to the entire presentation or to a specific author’s presentation (mine, for example). ou can also subscribe to an RSS feed of a particular tag that we’ve used. For instance, if you’re interested in reading all the posts on this site tagged “collaboration,” simply copy the RSS feed for that tag and subscribe to it in your feed reader of choice. The technology to accomplish this, to truly democratize history on the web, is readily available. We only need to make the effort to apply it.

The AAHC would do well to integrate RSS feeds into their own, freely available, online journal. Other journals, most especially those that are open-access, should make the effort to publish RSS feeds and disseminate their content to wider audiences. RSS feeds are primarily about access, about the public’s ability to subscribe to content and get regular, easy-to-obtain updates about recent publications. As an historian faced with the ever-increasing challenge of keeping up with the latest literature in our field, it makes good sense to me for academics to want a technology that makes that challenge a little easier.f

A while back, several bloggers discussed how blogs did not meet the rigorous criteria for serious scholarship, but almost everyone believed that the “blog as scholarship” was limited because of the medium. It’s quite true that the vast majority of academic blogging isn’t “serious” scholarship. Much of it is spontaneous, and consists of relatively short observations. But just because current academic blogging doesn’t qualify as serious scholarship in the eyes of many academics doesn’t mean that blogging can never be used in a scholarly capacity.

I believe there is a serious flaw in the logic that blogs inherently cannot be scholarly, a flaw that puts too much weight on the medium itself, and almost no weight on the actual content or arguments being published. The logic in this argument is that, because something is published in a blog, it can’t be “serious” scholarship.

Ironically (or perhaps not), to solve this problem, I believe that one goal proponents of digital history should strive towards is making the “digital” invisible. More specifically, I’m a strong supporter of putting history in a variety of media, and exploring the ways in which historical knowledge can be expanded and enhanced by that variety of media. David Staley’s arguments in Computers, Visualization, and History¹ and his subsequent examples adhere to a spirit of experimentation, but Staley also wants to make the content the primary focus, not the medium. Staley uses the medium to shed light on new ideas and propose new ways of looking a history, but it is the history that’s important. I think that too much attention is spent on the type of media being used, and too little attention is being spent on the actual enhancement of history content by that media. The reluctance of many history bloggers to even consider blogging as a scholarly activity is an example of our infatuation with, and mistaken preconceptions, about the media through which we present history. When thinking about using digital media for historical scholarship and research, we need to consider how the medium can help us ask new questions and posit new theses. For me, then, the “futures of digital history” is one in which “digital history” simply becomes “history.”

Stranded hurricane victims, failures of all levels of government, destruction by wind and water, and the massive displacement of Gulf Coast residents alerted us at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) that we were witnessing significant moments in American history. We also noticed how many people turned to the web for information, assistance, and communication with friends and family. Newspapers such as the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Houston Chronicle created online forums for their readers where people shared information about the status of their communities, while others created blogs and some shared photos on sites such as Flickr. The weblog indexing site Technorati reveals over 350,000 posts on Hurricane Katrina alone. How would the story of those storms be recorded and later told? How can we save the digital sources and ensure that the historical record is diverse and inclusive?

Building upon experience in creating popular history collecting projects, particularly the September 11 Digital Archive , CHNM set out to respond to these events and partnered with the University of New Orleans to create the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB): www.hurricanearchive.org.

Archivists and librarians constantly grapple with the best ways to maintain archives and preserve electronic materials, a conversation historians recently joined. Roy Rosenzweig urges his colleagues to share in that responsibility and to participate in saving the recent past in his essay, ‚ÄúScarcity or Abundance? Preserving the Past in a Digital Era‚Äù. He also encourages historians and archivists to rethink definitions of evidence and whether everything produced is worth saving. Orville Vernon Burton shares in that concern stating that “historians must take the initiative‚Äù not only in preservation but also to improve the field of history through the use of digital technology. To encourage preservation and the development of digital history projects, including online collecting sites, Dan Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig recently published a how-to guide, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Guides like Digital History make techno-phobic historians comfortable with the web so that they can join the conversation about saving emails, blogs, and websites that will affect how their colleagues in the future will write histories.

As the National Archives pushes forward in efforts to archive digital evidence from the federal government, other organizations seek solutions for preserving the large volume of born-digital materials. One large-scale effort to save the “digital now” on the web is the Internet Archive (IA). Established as private, non-profit organization, IA acts as a library that preserves website materials for the use of researchers and historians. Currently, their ‚ÄúWayback Machine‚Äù allows users to search 55 billion webpages archived since 1996. Working with the Library of Congress and National Archive, IA creates special collections focusing on prominent current events, such as presidential elections, and most recently, Hurricane Katrina. Far from complete, but IA offers an excellent snapshot of the “digital then” for given periods. One drawback is that IA‚Äôs web crawls cannot reach the deep web tucked away in databases and webmasters may block the IA from capturing their sites.

IA scans the web for an impression of what is available online at a given moment. IA’s scope does not include seeking contributions of digital files from those without websites.¬† Historians help fill that gap by developing popular collecting sites.

• Blackout History Project: One early example of a digital memory bank is the Blackout History Project . It invites visitors to complete a lengthy on-line survey and asks contributors to provide a phone number so that a longer oral history interview may be conducted on both the Northeastern blackouts in 1965 and the 1977 outage in New York City. Filled with a collection of 367 online stories and a handful of oral history transcripts, Blackout History Project offers a good example of the transition between online and oral history collection methods. This example from 1998 demonstrates how the Internet could help historians collect online.
• ECHO: In 2001, the ECHO project , (electronic, collecting history online), was created to collect and present the recent history of science, technology, and industry through the web. Most project sites target very specific groups of people, such as users of Usenet discussion boards; those affected by the accident at Three Mile Island ; or riders of the Washington DC Metro. Another purpose of ECHO is to create and share online tools, such as the Survey Builder that allows anyone to create a survey or prepare an oral history on their own. These free tools open the doors to small institutions and history classes seeking to find and collect information via the web. Finally, ECHOs third main objective is to annotate listings for all digital collecting projects.
• September 11 Digital Archive: Building on collecting experience and database structures established in ECHO, the September 11 Digital Archive was created by the Center for History and New Media and the American Social History Project. Though it started as a small effort in 2002, by the end of 2005 it had gathered more than 150,000 digital objects by simply asking people to ‚ÄúTell us your story.‚Äù Because of the international significance of September 11, interest in sharing experiences spread across the country and more people felt comfortable interacting in an online environment. Successful marketing and helpful partnerships, such as with the National Museum of American History , the Red Cross, and other collecting efforts, such as Voices from 9/11 Chinatown, made the September 11 Digital Archive the single most successful effort to collect and preserve digital materials related to a historical event. Lessons learned from building and maintaining such a large archive informed the early design stages of HDMB.
• WW2 People’s War: As CHNM‚Äôs efforts expanded, others have launched projects in the online collecting of history. For example, the British Broadcasting Corporation‚Äôs two-year online project to gather the stories of Britain‚Äôs World War II veterans and survivors of the London Blitz, entitled, WW2 People‚Äôs War have collected more than 1,200 narratives. Now closed to contributions, it is easily browsable by theme, region, or specific event making it accessible for general audiences interested in researching the stories of WWII London.
• Memory Wiki: One of the newest endeavors is the Memory Wiki, which builds upon the same principles of openness as the Wikipedia by encouraging anyone to share and save memories of their choosing. What sort of memories do they seek? Their answer is ‚Äúpretty much anything you remember that someone else might conceivably find interesting, now or in 500 years.‚Äù One distinct difference between this site and the Wikipedia is that once your story is submitted, the site editors proofread it but then lock the submission so no one else may change your words. In the same spirit as digital history sites, Memory Wiki‚Äôs motto is ‚ÄúEveryone has a Story. Make Yours History.‚Äù

To read more on digital memory banks go to: Cohen and Rosenzweig’s chapters on Collecting History Online, Digital History.

HDMB stands as another example of how the Internet can promote collecting narratives and saving the digital record of significant events and the “digital now.”

• Capacity: HDMB has an unlimited capacity for storing images, video, audio, and text files in one place. This is so different from a physical archive where storage issues constantly plague archivists and historians who must ensure the proper environment to accommodate a variety of objects in collections. Most recently the Smithsonian Institutions‚Äôs Cooper-Hewitt Museum announced that portions of their extensive design archives would relocate from inside the museum in New York City to facilities in Washington, DC that could better handle the volume.
• Accessibility: As soon as stories, images, or audio files are uploaded to HDMB, (after a short vetting process) they are available for the public to browse. Unlike oral histories that need transcribing before they are available to the public, or physical archives which often are only available during very specific hours, HDMB sources are always available online. HDMB was born two months after Hurricane Katrina hit and was one of the first history-focused hurricane responses available in old or new media.
• Flexibility and Interactivity: Flexibility in design allowed HDMB to be customized for our targeted audience: those affected by the hurricanes in some way. After testing the site with a group of University of New Orleans students, we modified the design and wording of questions. Designing in new media gives us flexibility to change the site design, as well as change the way visitors browse through collections as the site expands. The site also may be designed with as much or as little interactivity. Visitors interact with hurricanearchive.org on their own and decide what they want to contribute, the length of their contribution, and how much time they spend on the site. Many oral history projects seek out specific subjects and then historians ask them a set of questions. HDMB allows the contributor to control the direction of the submission. They determine what is most important.
• Manipulability: HDMB provides different ways to find information, by browsing images and stories, keyword searching, or viewing objects related by geography using our Google map. We ask contributors to provide the geographic coordinates of either their location before the hurricanes hit or the location that best represents the content of their submission by entering a zip code or street address. By dynamically combining this information and their contribution with Google Maps, we provide a visual way of browsing the archive that enables new kinds of research and connections to be made. Visitors may easily browse the contributions in a specific location (down to a specific street corner), or create a customized map that is populated solely by contributions that contain a certain keyword or type of object. This type of user-determined search is invaluable for those conducting research through thousands of objects, and impossible with a traditional physical archive.
• Diversity/Democratic: We designed HDMB to be accessible to the general public as HDMB seeks contributions from anyone with a hurricane story from Katrina, Rita, or Wilma. Those with low-grade browsers even have options to contribute on a special text-only page to ensure that this is accessible to as many people as possible. To be a grassroots effort, HDMB wants a diverse collection of experiences. By inviting everyone in to participate, HDMB also breaks down some artificial barriers between academia and the general public. Numerous efforts, particularly in New Orleans, are planned to reach people through public libraries, presentations, and by bringing laptops to public spaces with free internet access asking people to add their story to the archive. During Mardi Gras season, we distributed plastic cups with HDMB’s URL to reach those in Louisiana and Southeast Texas.
• Hypertextuality: Browsers may jump in asynchronous patterns via the map or through other sections of the site. Each section stands on its own and visitors decide on how to navigate through the site. The map offers the best example of hypertextuality because the map is alive with the collection. Refreshing the webpage shuffles the pins and produces a different selection each visit.

• Finding the stories and images to collect: From the beginning, we have refined and updated various strategies for collecting and publicizing HDMB. Relying heavily on personal and professional contacts in the early stages, we spread the word and developed partnerships in a very traditional way. We also turned to listservs, blogs, online forums and other electronic means for creating direct links to HDMB. Other efforts, such as distributing Mardi Gras cups with the HDMB logo and URL and public presentations, encourage the general participate to logon and add their story to the digital memory bank. Unfortunately, the site’s mere presence on the web does not guarantee participation or visitation.
  
• Passivity, Quality, and readability: HDMB is different from oral history project where you carefully choose subjects, tailor questions for your interview, and spend hours talking with your subject. Here individuals visit the site voluntarily and decide what they want to contribute and the duration of their stay–an active process. We do not edit postings for grammar or check for “accuracy.” As Cohen and Rosenzweig suggest, historians must rely on their critical analysis skills to determine if a submissions seems authentic. Since the project went live in November 2005, we have received no spam or mock contributions.
• Incorporating an understanding of memory becomes important when analyzing the quality and even readability of these contributions as well. Oral historians have tackled these issues, such as David Thelen and Alessandro Portelli who incorporate the study of memory into their interpretation. They emphasize that accuracy of memory is not always important when taking oral histories. What is important is that those people find those memories to be real. During the early days following Hurricane Katrina, news reports detailed horrific crimes–”from eyewitnesses”–that turned out to be false, but were very real for those waiting for help at the Superdome. When documenting the history of these storms the personal interpretation of those events, as memory, will be as important as the events themselves.
• Inaccessibility: Roy Rosenzweig reminds us that economic, social, and cultural issues remain one of the biggest challenges when confronting new techology. Dealing with the displaced and disenfranchised is a big concern for us, because our target population is dealing with loss on many levels and perhaps online activity did not play a huge role in their lives prior to the hurricanes. The Pew Internet and American Life Project’s most recent surveys find that 72% of all adults go online, but the numbers dip for those with less than a high school education to 38%, and to 54% for those with an income less than $30,000. In New Orleans, for example, the median household income in 2004 was $31,369. While we do not have hard figures on how connected New Orleanians were prior to the hurricane we know that there were many without computer access. Since the hurricanes there are even more challanges for those without the necessary hardware, so we created an internet phone account through Skype with a New Orleans exchange where anyone may call to record a digital story. Those digital files will be uploaded to the archive. Those with computers but no internet access will not need to wait long in New Orleans, because they will become the first major wireless city in the nation. Free wi-fi is becoming easier to find at cafes and computer usage is available at all public libraries. Awareness of inaccessibility issues does not solve them, but we are trying to accommodate the needs of our target population as best as we can.
• Durability: To ensure the longevity of HDBM, it will be saved in two main locations on stand-alone computers. The University of New Orleans has established a DSpace repository in collaboration with Louisiana State University (LSU) and we will deposit a second copy in the GMU‚Äôs digital repository, MARS.