With timing that is infelicitous, but hopefully still of some interest to readers of this list:

I am happy to announce BOOKS.FILES: Preservation of Digital Assets in the Contemporary Publishing Industry, a 25k-word report written with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and in collaboration with the Book Industry Study Group.

Download the PDF here:

This open access research report builds on a Convening held two years ago at the Pierpont Morgan Library that brought together representatives from book history and bibliography (among other fields) and the publishing industry. It addresses the global transition of contemporary publishing and bookmaking to digital workflows, and the implications for publishers' archives and other forms of primary source evidence for future book history, bibliography, and literary and cultural history more generally. It seeks to explain how books are actually made nowadays and at what points in the production process digital assets might be earmarked for future archiving.

The report includes sidebars by Kathi Inman Berens, Alan Galey, Lise Jaillant, Karla Nielsen, and Brian O'Leary. It will, I hope, be of interest to anyone working in publishing or publishing studies, bookmaking, the history of the book, and media studies, as well as, of course, those libraries and institutions actively collecting publishers' archives.

The timing, as I said, is infelicitous-- but perhaps also not a bad time to be thinking about archives, posterity, and cultural memory.

Best, Matt