“Clearly, the book is not dead.” That was the message University of Tennessee Libraries Interim Dean Linda Phillips shared with an audience gathered to honor UT faculty members who published books in the past year. One might have wondered if Phillips was guilty of bias in favor of printed books, except that online publishing was given equal billing at the event.
The April 13 reception in the John C. Hodges Library was hosted by the University Libraries, the Office of Research, and the Office of the Chancellor. More than fifty books representing sixty-five UT authors were on display, including several e-books viewable on laptops displayed alongside the bound volumes. The e-books were published by the University of Tennessee’s online imprint, Newfound Press.
“Scholarly publishing is just beginning a time of profound transformation,” Phillips said. She explained that the online
Newfound Press “makes peer-reviewed work of faculty authors as visible and as accessible as possible.”
Greg Reed, associate vice chancellor or research, voiced his enthusiasm for new means of disseminating the knowledge produced by UT faculty. “We’re pleased to partner with the Libraries to support the move to open-access journals publishing,” he said, and to help enable a variety of other activities such as Trace, the university’s online archive of scholarly work by UT authors.
Provost Susan Martin was full of praise for faculty achievements. “You can’t build a great university without a great faculty,” she said. “As you look through the book display, you will see that we have already come a very, very long way on that journey.…I think you’ll be amazed and impressed, as I continue to be, by the range and depth and breadth of scholarship of our faculty.”
To emphasize the point, Martin read aloud from a list of titles, including Text Mining: Applications and Theory (by Michael Berry), Ethics and Morality in Sports Management (by Joy DeSensi), Human Variation in the Americas: The Integration of Archaeology and Biological Anthropology (by Benjamin Auerbach), The Lawyer-Judge Bias in the American Legal System (by Benjamin Barton), and Lettering the Self in Medieval and Early Modern France (by Katherine Kong).
Among the e-books on display were Found, Featured, then Forgotten: U.S. Network TV News and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War by Mark Harmon, Southern Manuscript Sermons before 1800: A Bibliography by Michael Lofaro, and The Streaming Guide to Cataloging Remote Access Multimedia by Marielle Veve. Found, Featured, then Forgotten is a multimedia work illustrated with audio and video clips of news reports from the Vietnam era. Southern Manuscript Sermons is available as both a searchable database and as a print work. The Streaming Guide is a virtual manual for librarians who catalog online content that integrates different media formats. All three can be read on the Newfound Press website.
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Contact:
Martha Rudolph, UT Libraries, 865-974-4273, mrudolp2@utk.edu
Charles Primm, UT Media and Internal Relations, 865-974-5180, primmc@utk.edu