Back Talk — Looking Backwards

Column Editor: Jim O’Donnell (University Librarian, Arizona State University) <jod@asu.edu>

One day in 1990, my colleague Rick Hamilton from the Bryn Mawr College Greek Department had an idea. “We need a new book review journal in classics,” he said. “Concise, timely, high quality reviews. It just takes too long for the system to get around to book reviews nowadays.” “Great idea,” I said, “and we can send them out via email!” Rick gave me a look.

His was in fact a very smart look. It was 1990, the Internet barely existed in the minds of more than a very few, and nobody had email except a few zealots like me. (I got email when I had to buy a modem to connect to a database with five million words of the Latin texts of St. Augustine. People have needs sometimes.) And Rick had already started a very successful textbook series for Greek and Latin that was all camera-ready copy, cheaply reproduced and sold for $1 a volume. Why not do the same with a book review journal? It was a fabulous idea, in fact.

But I stuck with my email idea and Rick humored me. Our first issue with a dozen reviews (stooged up from academic friends we asked to write about something they had just been reading) was available in print and went out by email as well on November 26, 1990. I’d put out a note on the Humanist list, so at least a few people subscribed to our listserv and a few more followed.

That’s when the wider world intervened. I got an email from Ann Okerson at the Association of Research Libraries. “Hi,” she said, “I’m interested in these electronic journals people have started publishing. In fact I had a meeting of all the ones I could find last fall. Is that what you’re doing? Can I put you on my list?”

Well, we went on to be pretty successful. Bryn Mawr Classical Review is still in business, with ten thousand email subscribers, scazillions of hits on our website, and a record of publishing 15,000 book reviews over the last 30-odd years. We meant to have a big 30th birthday party in Bryn Mawr in 2020, but Covid intervened, so we just had the party a few weeks ago. (For more on our history, see our website [link: http://bmcr.brynmawr. edu] and look for items with issue numbers BMCR 2022.11.18, 2022.11.22, and 2022.11.26)

Meanwhile, ejournals have flourished. The first ambitious project to make a splash was the Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials, announced with a flourish in 1991 and rolled out soon after. Alas, it died a long time ago. Innovators, even when they’ve got a great idea, don’t always succeed. Ann Okerson, though, was the most visible chronicler, encourager, and impresario of good ideas in that period. She organized an annual series of exciting symposia on e-publishing in DC in the early ’90s for librarians, technologists, and publishers. I swear the university press community first realized what was about to hit them at one of those symposia. In 1991, Ann then published the first ever anywhere Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists and continued it through several more annual editions until the field became just too vast to try to control in something like a directory. The volume she and I coedited in 1995, Scholarly Journals at the Crossroads: A Subversive Proposal for Electronic Publishing, also published by ARL, may be the first manifesto for open access publishing anywhere.

The original 1991 edition of the Directory is worth a historical look. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported it thus: “The volume, the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, includes more than 30 journals, 1,000 scholarly lists, and 60 newsletters. It is available in a paperback book or in electronic text on Bitnet and Internet.” In fact there were 37 journals, extremely various in content, in that issue. What’s become of them?

It’s a little hard to be sure of the fate of some, but I made a sustained good faith effort over several months and, as best I can tell, there are three survivors. The most senior is Postmodern Culture, published now by the Johns Hopkins University Press and Project MUSE. John Unsworth and Eyal Amiran, the founding editors, beat Bryn Mawr Classical Review to the wires by a couple of months in the fall of 1990, and they credit the great librarian Susan Nutter at North Carolina State University for egging them on.

Those two survive in traditional academic ways. The only other survivor is a slightly different species of fish: Dargonzine [link: http://dargonzine.org/ ], offering “the Internet’s best fantasy fiction.” We can heave a sigh for Psycoloquy , the brainchild of the legendary Stevan Harnad, for example. The survival of PMC and BMCR can be attributed, I think, to the very good ideas that my colleague Rick and my friend John had about the content and the market. There really was a need for the content of those journals, that is, an audience ready to read and support them and write for them — and that’s what makes a serial publication successful.

That prehistoric world of “Bitnet and Internet” has faded from view, of course. It was in 1992 that the great Willard McCarty said to me in a conference hallway in Chicago, “You know, Jim, I think we’ve got about five years left.” “Huh?” I replied. “Oh, right now,” he went on, “people can say that you can’t do commercial activity on the Internet, but within about five years the big boys will discover the possibilities and we academics had better define and shape things as best we can before they show up.”

Four years later, in 1996, I bought a copy of C.L.R. James’s classic history of Caribbean revolution, The Black Jacobins, from a website called Amazon that offered to sell books. When I bought that book, I swear I assumed that it must be a site run by a feminist collective like the one that ran A House of Our Own Books down the street from where I worked in Philadelphia. I was, um, wrong. Willard was right.