New Tools for Scholary Publishing

I'm blown away by this article I discovered thanks to Cathy Davidson's HASTAC blog a few days ago. It was written by Robert C. Binkley and published in the Yale Review in 1935, and yet it describes current concerns among scholars and publishers more cogently than many contemporary authors have managed to do. I was particularly struck by several of his observations. First, on the subject of the "fetishism . . . toward the printed page":

The system by which professional research workers draw their livelihood from institutions of learning has had a curious repercussion upon their system of communication, resulting in a kind of fetishism in the attitude of the professional scholar towards the printed page. Since contributions to knowledge become effective as contributions only when they are communicated, the amount of research labor is measured by employers at the communicating point. A research scholar must "publish" or be regarded by his university as a drone. Just as tradition protected the use of parchment long after paper had become accessible, so it has protected the status of the printed book or article as the only vehicle for scholarly communication even when processes other than printing would be more appropriate. But the pressure of financial necessity is gradually forcing the scholars to accept near-print as the only means of taking up the slack between the requirements of their intellectual organization and those of the book trade. A more general use by them of near-print should relieve not only their financial situation but also that of the institutional presses, upon whose endowments too great a strain is now being placed.

Replace "near-print" with new media technologies and you have a pretty good summary of current affairs. The other passage that resonated for me was this:

The new hordes of college students throughout the country in the decade following the World War created a demand for more college instructors. In response to this demand, the graduate schools expanded like a machine-tool industry, turning out every year more Ph.D.'s. When the curve of college attendance began to level off in the depression, it was discovered that the production of apprentice scholars, keyed to an expanding market, went far beyond replacement needs. A turnover of about twenty per cent a year in the university teaching faculties would be necessary to give the new Ph.D.'s the kind of places they were prepared to fill. These young people trained for research could remain in the academic world only by going into the smaller colleges and academies, whose meager libraries give them little chance of continuing to do the kind of work they had been fitted to do. It seems inevitable that they will be lost to research scholarship unless the labor of this kind is redivided so that some of it can be performed away from the university setting, by people who are not university teachers.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We've encountered these same concerns in the 1970s and again more recently. Believe me; I know.