New forms and media, anyone?

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Patrick Murray-John

Especially given the mix of publishing and library types that a few people have already mentioned, I’d like to see if this question has legs:

What are we publishing/putting on our shelves, and are they the right things?

In part, I’m thinking here of Kindle Singles, which seem to take advantage of new technologies to aim for a form that’s not quite book form. Hacking the Academy and other awesomeness from Univ. of Michigan Press (hi Shana!) and others are also poking around the question of new and different kinds of things to publish.

So, anyone want to tackle the question of whether libraries could better serve their visitors with things other than books and journal subscriptions? What are those things, and why aren’t they there? What might need to happen to get more publishers (or others!) publishing these mystical, unicorn-like things?

(Or is this already happening, and I’m just in the dark about it? 🙂 )

Categories: General |

About Patrick Murray-John

Ph.D. in Medieval Lit from UW-Madison, then hunted a TT track job, was Visiting Ass't Prof. at University of Mary Washington, then switched to instructional technology at UMW. Joined CHNM in February 2011. As of 2018, I'm Associate Director for Systems in the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern Library -- woohoo! Love to talk all things Omeka, Linked Data, Drupal, Zotero. Preferably over beer.

2 Responses to New forms and media, anyone?

  1. Pingback: how to handle non-textual content? | THATCamp Publishing 2011

  2. hthornton says:
    October 26, 2011 at 6:36 pm

    Yes, I’m interested in exploring that. I’d also like to add apps to the list (consumer/reader ones, not library apps e.g. for the catalog). Are libraries buying them, and should they? How do they lend them to patrons?

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