Dear Colleagues: In accepting Heather Hawley's nomination for a new term as your Vice President for Research and Publications, I would like to outline for you a) how I see the function of this office, b) what I bring to the table and c) what I'd like to see us accomplish should you grant me another term.
The VPR&P takes the lead in the consultative process of setting broad policies for those areas of our publishing activity (primarily web presentation and reviews) other than listserv and our mailing lists, cordinates the certification of review editors, and participates with other officers and councillors in the deliberations of H-Net Council.
I am physically and practically outside the day to day management of our reviews, but try through my experience and particular perpective to facilitate participation in policymaking and the enhancement of H-Net publishing. Moderating E-Review E-REVIEW@H-NET.MSU.EDU is a principal tool to this end. Sometimes it seems that the unveiling of a new tool is unsettling to the routines that work for us editors and our networks, but you may rest assured that your comments are welcome and very useful.
Elsewhere in H-Net I am lead editor for HABSBURG, the network for East Central European history that came into H-Net back in 1994, and H-HistBibl, the history librarians' network. I'm an historian of Hungary and Romania, and my most recent research combines the fields of East European and library history. My paid job is in the Rutgers University Libraries, where I am a tenure track faculty member and responsible for building collections and liaising with academic programs in European and Asian history, medieval, Jewish, and South Asian studies, German, Slavic, and Hungarian languages. I co-chair our libraries' Scholarly Communication Committee, and in this function work with other library and faculty units to implement our university's digital library of scholarly publications. As a member of the libraries' Technical Services Council I've gained useful insights into technical services workflows that are often similar to those in the H-Net office. I'm also vice-chair of a library consortium called the German-North American Resources Partnership and chair of the jury for the American Library Association's recently announced ABC-Clio Online History Award.
Readers of E-Review know we have made great strides in the implementation of a long-felt desideratum for an automated interface for the management of reviews, both in the requesting and sending of books and in the workflow for publishing the actual reviews on list and web. Your constructive criticism of the automated interface is vital. The revision of the interface will be an ongoing project. We should also continue to encourage that networks move into reviewing that have not done so date.
Finally, I believe we need to consider the best options for an H-Net organizational repository of our scholarly content. The preprint/postprint server model dominates the literature on scholarly communication and such a server can be useful for us, but it is not necessarily a good fit for the discipline of history or for H-Net's special strengths: the spontaneity and autonomy of our communities of interest. We should continue to explore how we may facilitate the ingestion, archiving, and easier access to scholarly output in the fields we represent. Access will not necessarily mean the creation of a generic submission template or global search engine across all formats.
Years ago our first search engine tried to do this simultaneously for our web pages, logs, reviews, etc.-- but their heterogeneity worked against this so we ended up segregating the search engines for logs, reviews, and other resources. Institutions working on multiple-format repositories are all asking whether the ability to work across multiple formats is worth the substantial effort that would be needed to create this capability.
