The University will enter a new era of digital publishing with the help of a two-year, $635,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.
The monetary grant will allow the University Press of Virginia to create digital versions of faculty publications, rather than print versions. Printing digitally provides faculty with a wider array of media and technology to present their work.
In coordination with expert e-commerce faculty at the Darden School, University Press will begin working on the new project in the spring.
"The grant itself will be used to test a number of different experiments with business plans for digital publications to see what works and what doesn't," Assoc. English Prof. John Unsworth said.
University Press ordinarily would not engage in this type of experimentation with digital media. Unsworth said the grant will be underwriting the business risk involved in creating the infrastructure for digital publication.
Faculty now use the University Press to get their work edited and published to obtain a larger public base.
"The benefit to faculty to use the Press would be to plug into a business unit that produces income that comes back to the project," Unsworth said.
Eventually, the digital publication program will incorporate up to 10 of the Press' current publications including those aimed at American history, American and British literature, architecture and archaeology.
"Publication by the University Press that begins digitally is larger and more complex than ones that are printed publications," University Press Director Nancy Essig said.
History Prof. Edward L. Ayers already has dabbled in the field of digital publications with the creation of an award-winning Web site on Civil War history called "Valley of the Shadow."
"The advantage to me of publishing digitally is the ability to reach more people in a given day," Ayers said. "We have had over a million hits to the project already."
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