Fulcrum Presents the Next Big Thing in Scholarly Communications ... The Book! By Charles Watkinson (Associate University Librarian for Publishing / Director, University of Michigan Press) <watkinc@umich.edu> and Jeremy Morse (Director of Publishing Technology, University of Michigan Library) <jgmorse@umich.edu>
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gap has emerged between the capabilities of the dominant platforms that deliver electronic books to libraries and the digital scholarship practices in which librarians are observing their faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students engaged. The gap is particularly marked in humanities disciplines where an observed preference for reading in print or downloading PDFs to read offline does not equate to a lack of digital sophistication in research. Whether they are using their phones to capture images in the archives or building photogrammetric models of archaeological contexts, all humanities scholars are now, to a greater or lesser extent, digital scholars. Few would probably self-identify as “digital humanists” because their interests are primarily disciplinary rather than sociotechnical. However, they are producing rich, multimodal publishable outputs that the print-facsimile format most eBook platforms deliver does not support. The implications of the trend toward enhanced eBooks and interactive scholarly works for libraries and publishers are outlined in the excellent “Framework for Library Support of Expansive Digital Publishing,” created by Duke University Libraries (https://expansive.pubpub.org/). With the support of significant humanities funders in the USA, the ACLS Commission on Fostering and Sustaining Diverse Digital Scholarship is currently working on how to further support such work, with a particular focus on equity of opportunity to do so (https://www.acls.org/digital-commission-sustainingdiverse-scholarship/). While platforms for online exhibits and non-linear digital presentations have existed for decades (e.g., Scalar, Omeka), humanists have a growing desire to publish traditional monographs that reflect the richness of their research while also getting them academic credit. The impetus to adapt traditional publication modes has opened an opportunity for disruption by new digital platforms developed within universities. These include Manifold (University of Minnesota and CUNY Graduate School), RavenSpace (University of British Columbia and University of Washington), and Fulcrum (University of Michigan). These platforms, developed with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, combine the best features of the monograph and the ecosystem built around it with the new affordances of digital experimentation. Fulcrum is distinctive because it has been entirely developed within a library environment, making it particularly strongly connected to library systems and values. The platform now supports restricted and open-access collections delivering over 10,000 eBooks from more than 125 publishers to libraries. The platform’s continued improvement and maintenance are managed as a collaboration between the Publishing
Against the Grain / April 2022
and Library Information Technology divisions of the University of Michigan Library. The Publishing division, also known as Michigan Publishing, comprises the University of Michigan Press, Michigan Publishing Services, and Deep Blue Repository and Research Data Services. Combining a university press that publishes books, a library publishing service with a substantial journals program, and a research data team into a single organizational unit at Michigan may initially sound unwieldy. H oweve r, t h e i n t e g r a t i o n o f “...they are historically separate services allows Michigan Publishing to cater more producing rich, holistically to faculty and student multimodal authors whose research outputs are publishable increasingly diverse and disparate. Fulcrum is a manifestation of outputs that the the strengths within Michigan print-facsimile Publishing, integrating the scholarly format most “narratives” that university presses excel in packaging as books with eBook platforms primary sources and underlying deliver does not research “data.”
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While most of the eBooks currently on Fulcrum are relatively straightforward EPUBs or PDFs, an increasing minority respond to the needs of authors who want to publish data-rich long-form publications. These scholars come from an expanding range of disciplines. Early adopters include practice-based researchers in performing arts, scholars in interdisciplinary fields like American studies, and creators of data-rich publications in fields like archaeology. Most of the elements that humanists want to integrate into their publications so far are digitized images, video clips, and audio files. However, titles on Fulcrum also include numerical datasets, interactive maps derived from GIS data, and 3D models. The platform’s website (https://www.fulcrum. org/) highlights some examples from various client publishers. Each data object is curated in a Samvera Fedora repository layer as a “resource” with its own identifier and metadata. These resources play within the book using a variety of opensource tools. These include AblePlayer for video and audio and Leaflet for images and maps. EPUB.js is the reader utilized to deliver EPUB3 files and knit together the various resources into enhanced eBooks. The Mozilla PDF viewer enables online reading and printing of the less flexible PDF format publications. Fulcrum is not an authoring platform (like Scalar or Pressbooks) but nor is it just an aggregator platform (like ProQuest Ebook Central or EBSCO eBooks). It aims to place a professional publishing
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