Posted on behalf of Professor Liz Stanley:


I am interested in publishing a complete electronic edition of a set of some
7000 (transcribed and machine-readable) manuscript letters. Because of the
author of these (Olive Schreiner), this would appeal to readers world-wide
across the social sciences, arts and humanities. My aim is to have something
widely accessible, free, but with copyright safeguarded; and I have some
ideas about how to accomplish this. However, I now need to find colleagues
with technical expertise who can advise me on how to take this project
forward, but have drawn a blank in my own university and also among social
science colleagues with experience in e-journal publishing.

I have already explored similar kinds of projects in the USA. These are
all located within a humanities framework and basically are all tied
into the University of Virginia Electronic Imprint. There is one UK
similar project at Oxford, but this too is linked to the Virginia
centre. I have been unable to find any UK-based social science activity
of a similar kind - are there well-established social science parallel
projects that I have somehow missed?

I would also prefer not to have an academic publisher control (and
charge for) the edition - the plan is to have some print publications
and two letter collections in print (one in the UK, the other specific
to South Africa), but for the larger project to be the electronic
epistolarium.

UK-based academic publishers are of course increasingly providing
electronic versions of print-originating books, but these are basically
'bog standard books' and make little use of the possibilities of the
electronic medium. My intention is to utilise the electronic form to
present a body of material in a more innovative way.

Any ideas on who there might be in the UK that could advise? Things I
should be reading? People I should be talking to? Any suggestions
gratefully received.



Prof Liz Stanley, Director of the Centre for Narrative &
Auto/Biographical Studies, SPS, Adam Ferguson Building, University of
Edinburgh EH8 9LL; [log in to unmask]; http://www.sps.ed.ac.uk/NABS/



________________________________________________________________
Professor Nigel Gilbert, ScD, FREng, AcSS, Professor of Sociology,
University of Surrey, Guildford GU2 7XH, UK. +44 (0)1483 689173