Projects and Experiences of Manifold Users

University of Arizona Press, open.uapress.arizona.edu

• Open Arizona explores the histories and experiences of Indigenous and Latino groups in the southwestern United States, foundational areas of the press’s long publishing history. Our project has brought sixteen out-of-print works back. The works touch on topics such as the impact of government policy on Indigenous communities and the experiences of Mexican American communities throughout the 20th century. Additionally, we have commissioned two new essays to contextualize these works and their continued relevance. More about our latest titles is available here.

• With a press our size, finding sustainable ways to do a new thing is always a challenge. Manifold has given us a tool to engage with new formats that we can fit into our workflow. As a library-reporting press, the libraries’ IT department was instrumental in helping us deploy and upgrade our Manifold instance.  

Athabasca University Press, aupress.manifoldapp.org

• Athabasca University Press will be presenting its entire list (front and back) in Manifold.

• Due to the incredibly smooth epub upload process and the elegant and professional presentation of textual material on the platform in both mobile and desktop environments, we felt Manifold would take AU Press’s commitment to OA to a whole new level. It also presented AU Press with an opportunity to offer a reading experience that was superior to many of the platforms on which our OA material is currently being read. It is our hope that because this reading will take place on a platform that is more directly connected to our own website (and able to provide us with analytics about how the material is being used and read), we will be in a better position to report on the investment made in the press by our parent institution and the benefits of making this material open. We look forward to the release of the “standalone” project instance of Manifold, which is the one we will be developing for our purposes.

University of Cincinnati Press, ucincinnatipress.manifoldapp.org

• At Cincinnati we are using Manifold with the press imprints and selectively with Library Publisher Services Projects to develop new modes of publishing and bridge the gap between the author and the reader pre- or post-publication. We are developing a workflow and tools that allow authors to develop more innovative monographs and use an open access platform both to help with the writing process and to continually engage readers. We have five projects in the pipeline and hope to have the first one up in June. We are also exploring ways to use Manifold as an instructional tool using annotation and iterative texts to document the work process. So far we have created a Digital Content Exploration Worksheet. We are currently developing a Manifold workflow for pre-prints such as having materials proofread and permissions cleared.

• Our challenges include finding ways to standardize and style Manifold to maintain the UCincy Press look, create a sustainable path forward for preservation and access, and integrate the works into the library catalog for discovery and retrieval.

Concordia University Press, concordia.manifoldapp.org

• Concordia University Press is a new scholarly press based in Montreal, Canada. We’re working with Manifold to present our first catalogue including four series, two book titles, and a digitized backlist.

• The nature of the materials we are working with has instigated debate on digital forms and appropriateness to textual content. When should a previously published text be presented as a static artifact? When should text be unlocked from its previous form to flow across digital platforms? What do we learn or perceive through these different forms of reading?

CUNY, cuny.manifoldapp.org

• CUNY’s instance aims to serve as an Open Educational Resource (OER) repository for the 25-campus City University of New York system. Faculty are using Manifold to build OERs for their classes, while CUNY staff, such as those in the Teaching and Learning Center, are also using Manifold to publish handbooks and other original publications for distribution within CUNY. Examples include a custom edition of Petrarch’s poetry, with 75 poems and audio clips; a collection of “CUNY Student Editions” of 19th-century American texts for use in English classes across CUNY, to ensure that students have access to free, high-quality versions of the texts; and an edited volume of student papers entitled Structuring Equality: A Handbook for Student-Centered Learning and Teaching Practices.

• It’s been great to see professors develop materials and instructions that others can use to create similar materials.

Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, manifold.ecds.emory.edu

• Emory will publish two books this summer: Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Quilts of Gwendolyn Ann Magee (2014 / forthcoming) and Replicating History: Guide to the Plaster Casts on View at the Michael C. Carlos Museum and in Michael C. Carlos Hall, Emory University (1994 / forthcoming)

• Because Emory does not have a press, we decided to start with two older books that might find new life as Manifold editions. One was originally published as an iBook by Southern Spaces, a journal based in the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS), and the other is a print pamphlet published by Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum. We do not have an editorial workflow or staff in place, so the biggest challenge for us so far is handling the inevitable editorial work required to retrofit older publications to a new platform.

Indiana University Press, publish.iupress.indiana.edu

• One of the first IU Press Manifold projects is a pilot this spring with the IU Center for Religion and the Human—a Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs—to discuss, using the Manifold platform, a collection of essays entitled “Theologies of American Exceptionalism.” Nearly two dozen scholars and theologians will gather on the Bloomington campus for the Politics of Religion at Home and Abroad Capstone Workshop, and will use the robust annotation and commenting tools found in Manifold to collaborate on this collection of fifteen interlocking essays that reflect on the vagaries of exceptionalist claims in and about the United States. The project will result in an open access publication hosted on Manifold, and will provide researchers with first-hand understanding of open peer review. Also, in March 2019, IU Press was awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to digitize 163 scholarly monographs and edited volumes from its backlist, and will host them on Manifold. This initiative is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities/Mellon Foundation’s Humanities Open Book Program to bring back to the public essential out-of-print books in an OA format.

• IU Press has leveraged the strengths of its Libraries Technologies Core Services team to host its own Manifold instance which runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are working closely with Manifold’s development team, which has been amazingly responsive to any questions and concerns that have come up, and we look forward to providing feedback to the developers to smooth the path for any sites interested in the self-hosting model.

Liverpool University Press, liverpooluniversitypress.manifoldapp.org 

• Liverpool University Press launched Using Primary Sources on the Manifold platform at the end of April 2019: an open access teaching and study resource that combines over 150 rare archival source materials with 20 high-quality chapters by leading academics. We have plans to develop a Digital Collaboration Hub on Manifold, providing our authors with a place to engage with their readers and the academic community as well as publish additional resources for their LUP publications.

• Having used other platforms previously, the ease of using Manifold is striking. It is constantly evolving with additional features and the team behind it are very responsive to feedback and ideas. The main challenge has been ensuring we don’t get carried away due to the staff time required and we remain clear about Manifold’s purpose for Digital Humanities at LUP, and how it complements our existing website, which can handle open access books and e-book collections.

University of Minnesota Libraries, umnlibraries.manifoldapp.org

• University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing publishes open access monographs, textbooks, and journals across multiple platforms/technologies. UMN Libraries published our first monograph on Manifold in December of 2018. To date, an additional three titles in production have been identified for release on Manifold.

• Manifold gives our monographs a professional reader experience. It allows for our monographs to stand out from our open textbooks. We have also identified our Manifold home page as a digital home for our publishing portfolio (including publications not in Manifold.)

University of Minnesota Press, manifold.umn.edu

• The University of Minnesota Press publishes boundary-breaking books in the humanities and social sciences. Our Manifold site is home to our open access publications which are from a variety of disciplines including architecture, history, critical theory, digital culture, and media studies, as well as our Forerunners series. Readers will find published books as well as iterative projects that are in editorial development on the platform as authors are engaged in the research and writing of their books. We presently have thirty-five projects live on our site.

• Iterative projects are complex and require discussion and planning between the press and the authors around scope and expectations—all the more for media that will require permission to include onsite and, potentially, in print. These projects highlight the need to plot out an internal workflow to ensure the materials that are prepared for Manifold can also easily be transitioned to integrate with standard book production procedures.

Reanimate Publishing, reanimatepublishing.org

• Reanimate is an intersectional feminist publishing collective, directed by Carol Stabile and Roopika Risam, that is recovering archival writing by women in media activism. Through Manifold, we are piloting the first edition in our collection, the autobiography of Jean Muir.
• We found the ability to incorporate related materials along with the edition especially useful as it allows us to include original archival documents for reference by readers.

Temple University Press and Libraries, temple.manifoldapp.org

• For our pilot project, we used Manifold to make four backlist titles in literary studies open access. Going forward, we plan to use Manifold as a portal for all open access books published by the Press, and for all open textbooks published by North Broad Press, a joint Libraries/Press imprint.

• Manifold was designed for monographs, so a big challenge for us has been to figure out how to make it work for textbooks.

University of Washington Libraries and Press, uw.manifoldapp.org

• We’re using Manifold to publish the press’s first open access books. We’ve found a lot of interest around classroom use, for both student activities and student publications. We’re also using the platform to workshop our own work, and have been talking with colleagues about using it for proceedings and other publications.

• The UW Libraries is in the early stages of starting digital publishing/digital scholarship services. Our pilot has brought up the need for a flexible way to systematically review new digital platforms without creating barriers to adopting new systems. Teaching with Manifold has provided us opportunities to bring conversations around digital privacy, accessibility, and fair use to students in a classroom context.

University of the West Indies Press, uwipress.manifoldapp.org

• The University of the West Indies Press is the oldest university press in the Caribbean region. We’re using Manifold to support one of the university’s strategic pillars of providing ACCESS (of UWI Press content) to a global audience by showcasing the table of contents and excerpts of selected titles from our backlist. These will be supported by added educational resources such as video clips and lectures. We’re also using it for open access journals published by the UWI Press JOC programme. We’re providing select free resources to faculty to stimulate the development of course content with UWI Press titles and titles from other university presses represented on Manifold. And we’re using it for innovative, creative e-book content development.

• We were happy to have hosted Terence, who provided great insight into using the platform. We should have better utilized his presence to create more projects.