The Vega team is working on a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in prep to offer hosting through Wayne State University Libraries, and we will be rolling out more information as we can over the course of this year.
One of the first projects is to draw on our list of signatories from the original Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, which included 14 letters of support from venue editors/publishers who were interested or willing to try Vega out once it became ready. It takes a long time to build a system from scratch, but this summer we’re excited to be working with several of those venues to test how their content works (or doesn’t) in Vega, to determine how workflows might best be set up as well as to decide what the next steps of our development need to be to support multiple venue types.
So, this summer, we’re working closely with three venues, each of slightly different type:
- Borrowers and Lenders: A Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, which is one of the longest-running (if not the longest??) peer-reviewed digital journal that also publishes some multimedia content in literary studies. B&L started in 2005 by late founding editor Christy Desmet. It is currently published using a homegrown system called <emma>, created for doing text-markup at University of Georgia, with HTML output.
- Journal of Transportation Management is a journal published out of Wayne State University Libraries and exists primarily in PDF form, currently published in Digital Commons/bepress.
- Digital Rhetoric Collaborative book series, an imprint of University of Michigan Press. The DRC publishes “enhanced monographs” such as books that need a screen-based, multimedia-driven, interactive reading experience. The books they publish are currently a mixture of HTML sites, with some Fulcrum eBook versions for more recent publications.
As we find interesting outcomes on these projects, we will post some updates here.