Omohundro Online
Here at the Institute, confidence about our participation in the technological advances sweeping the historical profession was suddenly checked when the College of William and Mary’s IT department installed the 2007 Microsoft Office suite on our computers. Chaos reigned for several days as we tried to figure out how to insert page numbers and comment boxes and wondered why certain toolbar buttons seemed to have vanished into the void. But though the loss of the Edit menu has caused some sleepless nights, we like to think that we’ve triumphed over another round of computer-generated adversity. To celebrate, we’d like to share some of the newest developments in the fast-changing world of Omohundro Online.
Our last number promised that in future the online supplemental materials for each issue of the William and Mary Quarterly would be listed here. Since WMQ authors first began harnessing the power of the Web to support materials that print is unable to accommodate, we have sought better and better ways to make sure readers know where to find those materials. It was this goal that prompted us to feature the supplemental materials in Uncommon Sense. All WMQ online supplements are available at http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/supplement.html.
There are two supplements online for the October 2008 articles. The first accompanies Claudio Saunt, “Go West: Mapping Early American Historiography” (745–78), and supplies a complete list of sources for Saunt’s Table II (page 770). The second goes with Wesley J. Campbell, “The French Intrigue of James Cole Mountflorence” (779–96), a Sources and Interpretations piece in which Campbell translates a recently discovered letter Mountflorence wrote to French authorities offering to lead an attack on Spanish Louisiana. Campbell also discusses the letter’s possible connections to other early American western intrigues, including the Genet affair. A transcription of the original document, including the underlining that may have been done by someone reading the document when it was first received in 1792, appears online.
The William and Mary Quarterly continues to benefit from association with the dynamic JSTOR, which is stretching its interests in many different directions these days. Our participation in the Publisher Sales Service (pay-per-view) program has been going strong for a year and a half now. During the first three quarters of 2008, more than a thousand articles were sold through the program. Purchasers abroad, from Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, the U.K., and Uzbekistan, made up 8.1 percent of these sales.
The Institute has been very pleased with the response to its participation in JSTOR’s pay-per-view service. Moreover our usual price per article (a total of $9, of which $5 is our fee and $4 is JSTOR’s service fee) tends toward the low end of the scale among participating JSTOR journals. We were surprised, therefore, to learn from JSTOR in July that from December 2007 to April 2008, WMQ had more than 280,000 turn-aways—people who tried and failed to gain access to the journal—from the JSTOR site. Since the ultimate result of their investigation of WMQ was failure to gain access, these people were clearly opting not to use the Publisher Sales Service Program to access articles in which they were interested. JSTOR asked us to participate in an experiment to determine whether lower prices for individual articles would result in higher purchase numbers. So from September to December 2008, we lowered our individual article fee to $3.75 ( from $5) and JSTOR lowered its service fee from $4 to $1.25, making the total cost for each individual article $5, instead of $9. Once the results of this experiment are in, we will decide whether to return to our original price structure or to retain the reduced rates.
As readers of previous installments of this column might remember, for a couple of years now JSTOR has been seeking to increase access to its collections in Africa. To that end it has been collaborating with Aluka (www.aluka.org), a not-for-profit initiative working to create a digital library of African and African-related material. With assistance from more than one hundred repositories around the world as well as other institutions up to and including governments, Aluka has created a library that now stands at several hundred thousand primary and secondary sources on Africa, divided into three collections: African Plants, African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes, and Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa. One of Aluka’s projects recently garnered media attention: the organization set up a digital photo studio in Timbuktu, where newly trained local staff began to digitize a collection of books and manuscripts from the city’s golden age. Aluka anticipates that at least three hundred of these rare manuscripts will be available to scholars worldwide through the Internet by 2009. “Even if Timbuktu today is a dusty, mud-brick shadow of its past renown, living mainly on the few tourists attracted by its name and legend,” noted John Noble Wilford in the New York Times, “the pages of its history are emerging from obscurity and, in some cases, are being disseminated by the speed of light.”1
Until 2008 Aluka had been “incubated” by Ithaka, an organization created to support promising new projects that promote the use of technology in higher education until they are able to strike out on their own or join larger existing organizations. Aluka, having now reached that point, will unite with JSTOR, and its three collections will be avilable for licensing from JSTOR beginning in 2009. The activities of the two organizations have been integrated since July 28, 2008, but integrating the two separate online archives will take a while. For now, Aluka content continues to be accessible through www.aluka.org, but JSTOR will be looking to initiate ways to make Aluka content more accessible from the JSTOR site.
JSTOR and Aluka see their partnership as an important step toward further increasing access to digital resources in Africa and other parts of the developing world. “While still early days,” writes JSTOR Executive Director Michael Spinella,“we see great potential in deepening connections between Africa and other parts of the world through the digital sharing of materials and ideas.”2 The situation in many African countries involves numerous challenges, such as the high cost of Internet access and the frequent scarcity of power, to quick dissemination of the combined archive, but signs such as the steady increase in usage of Aluka’s collections, with about 12 percent of that usage coming from Africa, offer encouragement that the combined power of JSTOR and Aluka can make a real difference.3
Previously in this space, we have also mentioned JSTOR’s development of regional collections, beginning with the Ireland Collection. JSTOR announced the release of the first material for the Ireland Collection on August 8, 2008. All material is anticipated to be digitized by the end of 2009. Remember, your institution must subscribe to the Ireland Collection for you to have access to these materials. For nonprofit organizations in the U.K. and Ireland, participation fees for the Ireland Collection will be waived.
If you’re interested in monitoring the ongoing addition of new content to the JSTOR archive, the JSTOR Announcements page, www. jstor.org/page/info/about/news/announcements.jsp, can help you keep track.
Finally, the William and Mary Quarterly is now participating in JSTOR’s new Corporate and For-Profit Access Initiative, which offers use of the archive to for-profit organizations for the first time. Publishers can opt in to the program if they so desire; it is not mandatory. The cost to for-profit organizations is comprised of a one-time fee plus a tiered annual fee based on usage. JSTOR devised the program in response to an increasing number of requests from corporations, especially since JSTOR was indexed by Google, that their staffs be allowed access to the archive.
Yes, the Institute has its very own Facebook group, created by apprentice Kristina Poznan. If you’re a Facebook user, check out the group page.
Meg T. Musselwhite
JSTOR Coordinator
Footnotes
1. John Noble Wilford, “Project Digitizes Works from the Golden Age of Timbuktu,” New York Times, May 20, 2008. A July 28, 2008, JSTOR announcement about Aluka and JSTOR’s merger, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/news/announcements/2008.jsp#JulA, supplies a link to this article.
2. Michael Spinella, July 28, 2008, JSTOR announcement about Aluka and JSTOR’s merger, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/news/announcements/2008.jsp#JulA.
3. See the Wilford article as well as Michael Gallagher’s Sept. 28, 2008, entry in the Aluka blog, http://blog.aluka.org.
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