oldmoney.vassar.edu: A Case Study in Scholarly Communication and Student Participation in the Digital Age

My talk begins with a brief introduction to a web-based teaching and research project undertaken at Vassar. Old Money: Greek and Roman Coins in the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center (oldmoney.vassar.edu) is a searchable database and digital exhibit of a previously unpublished collection of c. 1000 Greek and Roman coins at Vassar College. However I do not wish to present a "dog and pony show." Rather I will present this project, and the lessons learned from it, to focus discussion on two important opportunities presented by changes in the technologies of scholarly communication: first, the ability to make small collections available to the wider scholarly community, and second the ability to link scholarship and teaching to a single integrated project. These two topics are not unrelated.

First, it is not news to anyone that the traditional economic model of scholarly communication in Classics relies heavily on publishers offsetting publication and review costs with subscriptions and sales (cf. the works of H. Roosendaal & P. Geurts). This has made it difficult to publish work outside the mainstream of the discipline or, as I am interested in here, work related to smaller collections of antiquities owned by many institutions. I will begin with an examination of how new models of scholarly communication being discussed now will affect the ability of colleges to register scholarly as well as pedagogical work done with their local resources (cf. the work of S. Harnad). In particular I will look at projects emerging from in the hard sciences, like the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) spearheaded at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Second, scholarly communication in the sciences is regularly a collaborative effort involving professors, post-docs, graduate students, and undergraduates each participating at their own level of expertise. This has not been the case in the Humanities or Classics, in part because of emphasis on individual critical analysis but also in part because a working system for collaboration leading to publication has not been in place. Indeed the relationship between teaching students and doing research has always been difficult to articulate in the Humanities outside of large research universities. I will return to new models of scholarly communication and use Oldmoney to discuss how they support collaborative work (especially using smaller collections) in which many researchers work on multiple levels to produce an aggregate project or publication.