Dr. Hooper is Chair of the Humanities Department and currently teaching a new class in digital humanities that combines research, technology and art in one course. He recently published an open source scholarly work on the artist Ernst Barlach, titled: Ernst Barlach: bibliographical listing of secondary literature. This book is freely available online.
According to Professor Hooper, It was conceived as an online resource and not as a two-volume reference work simply because technology offers the opportunity to make a much more valuable resource – for example there are links in the text to sources such as WorldCat for example — those aren’t possible in hard copy!
Check it out on SIMON.
Recently Kent shared some insights about this project with Library Director, Jane Carlin and learn more about open access resources by visiting our web page on scholarly communication; http://alacarte.pugetsound.edu/subject-guide/13-Scholarly-Communication
What prompted you to make this resource available as an open source academic book?
I am philosophically opposed to proprietary bibliographical software, for one. And for another, most bibliographical software wasn’t sophisticated enough for what I wanted to do. And I am also in favor of making my work freely available to anyone interested in it, as opposed to making people pay to use it. ( Publishing the work in hard copy form would have meant royalties to me so laughably miniscule, I like to say I would earn more money playing a couple of bar gigs over the course of a weekend) As for the vetting process of this kind of manuscript–if the bibliographical listing is good, scholars will use it. If it has shortcomings, they will have the opportunity to work with me to improve it! In fact, I very much hope other Barlach scholars will see the value in working collaboratively on this project. I would like to move on to a new project–I haven’t worked on Barlach in years–so the hope is some young Barlach scholar will actually want to take over where I have left off.
Tell us about the content.
This is a bibliographical listing of secondary literature related to Ernst Barlach, a German Expressionist artistic multiple talent. One of the biggest problems for scholars working on Barlach is that there is no decent bibliography of secondary literature; another problem is that the secondary literature is scattered in a variety of fields and subfields: art (and then sculpture, woodcuts, drawings; and then even finer wood sculpture/bronzes/porcelain), literature (prose, drama, autobiography, travel literature, etc). And then there are all the reviews of exhibitions of his visual art; reviews of all the stagings of his plays. The landscape is quite varied — and anyone working on Barlach is wise to consult as wide a range of secondary literature as possible. Now, at least, scholars will know what has been written about Barlach and his works; and these scholars will also save a lot of time in the preliminary research phase, simply because I will have already leafed through the many many dozens of reference sources that catalogue secondary literature.