Thanks for the thoughtful comment! Great point about the problems related to archival material with regards to public domain and copyright, something that gets quite tricky quite fast. This also reinforces my comment regarding that I know just enough about these issues to know just how little I know about them. Of course it does remind me of Roy Rosenzweig and Dan Cohen’s calls in Digital History for academics to not be so overly cautious about copyright and fair use.

-Cameron

First, books are more or less standard, discrete units, and you can standardize how you cite and refer to them – perhaps using Ben’s suggestion of the LCCN, or for articles a DOI (though I think these are less common in the humanities). I imagine it would be possible for people to individually post their reviews on their own sites and then someone could come up with a way to crawl those pages and aggregate links to reviews in some more central location. Or people could post links back to their own reviews on a site set up to make it easy to link books with reviews. I’m sure there are other relatively simple alternative ways of doing this.

Second, book reviews, while not original in the scholarship sense, are original to the review author. You have the right to post your own content. I suspect the only way there would be a real potential problem is if you posted excerpts that were way beyond fair use.

The situation is different, and more difficult, when you get to posting images and transcriptions of sources. I suspect archivists would worry as much, possibly more, about the rights issue than the formatting/documentation issue in this case. Generally, copies you make in an archive – photocopies, photos, etc. – are supposed to be for your own research use. If they’re public domain, it may be ok to post them anyway. But a lot of stuff isn’t public domain and in many cases the archives are not the rightsholders and would not be able to grant you permission to post your copies online. Arguably, people are overly cautious about this kind of thing, but it’s a real concern.

That said, I do think there is potential for sharing information about collections even in the absence of being able to post images/transcriptions. Researchers could write up summaries of their individual source collections and refer back to the archives where the originals can be found. These could be like finding aids, but simplified and individualized to an extent. I think it is much less common for researchers to do that as a routine part of their workflow, but I think it would be a very useful thing to have.

Great points. I agree that archivists are absolutely right to shudder at formatting concerns and I think the ephemerality of this kind of indexing is particularly worrying – for instance, what happens if I let my domain registration lapse in a couple of years? Unfortunately, I just can’t see too many academics putting in the time to get it right unless there is some centralized, incredibly low-barrier repository to dump things into (equally problematic). From a pragmatic standpoint I would rather see people getting into the habit of making things available than not, even if it’s done poorly.

-Cameron

A single online repository is probably impractical. (Although really, if it only included text, something could probably get thrown together at a THATcamp).

I do wonder if the archivists would be right to shudder at the ‘poorly formatted’ nature; putting stuff online to be indexed just by Google is a little weird. Probably we should be changing citation patterns to include some sort of unique identifier (LCCN, I guess) with each of those books–then they could get spun back into the body of scholarship in all sorts of ways.