The digitization of the American Numismatic Society’s (ANS) backlist of monographs has been funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as part of the joint NEH-Mellon Humanities Open Book Program. All of the ANS’s book-length publications through 2010 will be made available for free online for anyone to use. The ANS is one of the United States’ oldest academic publishers, producing printed scholarship since 1866, pre-dating storied university presses such as Johns Hopkins University (1878), the University of Pennsylvania (1890), and the University of Chicago (1891). The ANS continues to lead the way with digital scholarly publications, something it could not have done without the support of the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
This is the second year the ANS has received Mellon funding for the project, and will conclude the work begun in 2016. In 2016, the Humanities Open Book Program selected 10 academic publishers to convert their out-of-print books of enduring scholarship into EPUB e-books licensed to allow readers to search and download these books freely, and to read them on any type of e-reader. In 2017, eight grants were awarded.
As in 2016, the ANS will convert its remaining scanned books into TEI XML, which will allow for instant generation of e-books as well as internet-friendly text that both contains and encourages links to other content online: related people, places, and events.
“Numismatics is uniquely placed in between history, archaeology, economics, art history, geography, and other disciplines,” Andrew Reinhard, Director of Publications for the ANS, said. “By encoding these books and making them available as Open Access, scholars and hobbyists alike can exploit the true interdisciplinary nature of numismatic data for their own work, finding content and making connections that would otherwise be hidden.”
“Academic and non-academic researchers increasingly use the Internet as a source of information and a vehicle for disseminating the results of their work,” said Earl Lewis, President of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. “Today, more than ever, scholars, teachers, students, and members of the public need access on the Internet to reliable and authoritative works that were previously published but are now out-of-print. The Humanities Open Book initiative seeks to help provide that much-needed access.”
The grant covers the encoding and tagging of the remaining 127 ANS monographs from three series: Numismatic Studies (three titles), Coinage of the Americas (three titles), and Numismatic Notes and Monographs (121 titles). At the conclusion of the grant period, the ANS will continue to make its TEI XML-encoded books available for free online one year after publication of new scholarship.
The second batch of Mellon-funded EPUB and TEI-encoded publications will be available by June 2018. The ANS thanks The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for its continued support, and the Mellon Foundation and NEH for their enthusiasm and commitment to making the Humanities available to everyone. With the NEH’s funding and very mandate under threat, the ANS encourages its US-based members and researchers to contact their elected senators and representatives to remind them that the Humanities are what makes us human.
