UA News

The University of Arizona Press received a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in January. Now, the UA Press will join five other institutions in a newly funded project.

The University of Arizona Press has received its second grant in 2009 from the distinguished Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The new $282,000 one-year planning grant has been given to the UA Press along with five other university presses to collaboratively develop a digital collection of New World archaeology scholarship.

The UA Press will be working with the University of Alabama Press, the University Press of Colorado, the University Press of Florida, the Texas A&M University Press and the University of Utah Press.

Together, the institutions will explore ways to deliver data- and illustration-rich digital editions of cutting-edge archaeological research.

The project, the "Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative," will give scholars and professional archaeologists the ability to review supplemental data not often contained in conventionally published volumes.

"This initiative enables each press to break out of the traditional monograph form, in which it is often financially impossible to offer digital resources alongside the book," said Kathryn Conrad, interim director of the UA Press.

Together, the six participating presses publish more than 70 titles in this field annually, covering the southeastern and southwestern United States, the Mountain West, the Great Basin, Texas, Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Caribbean.

The archaeology -focused collaboration is one of seven multi-year joint university press projects the Mellon Foundation has funded since the launch of its Monographs Initiative in 2007.

The initiative serves to encourage presses to work together in publishing a larger number of first books in underserved and emerging areas of humanistic scholarship.

Like scholarly books in other humanities fields, sales of archaeology title remain limited. Presses must enforce strict length and image limitations to constrain production costs.

The books produced as part of this initiative will be enhanced by large data sets, color illustrations, video components, three-dimensional, rotatable images, and in some cases, interactive components such as reader commenting.

Ultimately, the digital platform could "quite possibly change the way scholarly resources are produced in the future," Conrad said.

The University Press of Colorado will administer the planning grant, which will fund a shared project manager.

If the program reaches full implementation, the presses could potentially create a third-party entity devoted to the creation and maintenance of the digital platform.

The presses also plan to work on a business model for the proposed platform. In addition, the presses plan to develop a prototype digital book, providing a workable platform that could potentially be used by scholarly presses around the world.

While the initiative will involve publishing many books both in print and digital form, the participating presses will enhance digital editions with data not currently available in most printed books in the field.

Allyson Carter, the UA Press editor-in-chief, said the strength of the digital initiative lies in the participating presses' depth and breadth in New World archaeology.

The UA Press has long been committed to publishing exceptional anthropological and archaeological research since it was founded in 1959.

The press currently has more than 200 archaeology titles in print, including J. Jefferson Reid and Stephanie Whittlesey's highly regarded book titled "The Archaeology of Ancient Arizona."

In January 2009, the University of Arizona Press was awarded a grant for more than one million dollars from the Mellon Foundation to support the publication of first books in indigenous studies.