 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||
|
FEATURE
The idea is to bring information alive in multimedia, one-stop-shopping style Web sites. The sites, available to subscribers, bring a vast database of field-specific research together with original articles, news, teaching materials and visuals. "Everything came out of asking faculty here and at other schools: 'What are you doing in your classes and in your research? What do you need?'" says Kate Wittenberg, director of EPIC. "What scholars say they want is a place they can get the best materials in their field, regardless of the form they're in." EPIC is a not-for-profit organization based on campus and run in partnership with the Columbia University Press, AcIS (the university's computing center) and the libraries. It was the brainchild of Wittenberg, former editor in chief of Columbia University Press, who was responding to the problem of less and less academic material making it into print. The sites are run by scholarly advisory boards and staff at Columbia, and are subscribed to by libraries, other universities, government offices, research institutes and news agencies. "We're interested in how the digital environment can enhance and improve teaching and learning and research in particular fields," Wittenberg says. "The value of the projects is that they aggregate volumes of material." They also increase the general audience for scientific and scholarly research by putting the material in a form more accessible than a two-dimensional journal article that realistically is only sought out by motivated individuals in the field. Because electronic publishing is more efficient and less expensive than print, EPIC hopes to increase the amount of research that is published. EPIC's first full-scale project was CIAO, Columbia International Affairs Online (www.ciaonet.org), which launched in the fall of 1997 and has become a prodigious source of news and research for international affairs. Every month, what CIAO's editor deems the most important development in the field is introduced in an essay and explored in related articles. The featured topic at press time was Afghanistan and the Taliban. In addition, the site includes a searchable database of working papers, conference materials, journal abstracts, full-text books, maps, a schedule of meetings, economic data and links to other sites. "One of the things that makes CIAO distinctive is that it pulls together current working papers from most of the world's top research institutes on international affairs," says Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Relations Jack Snyder, a former chair of the political science department. "This means that subscribers to CIAO can get a picture of current research on global issues as it is emerging rather than waiting months, or longer, for the research to appear in journals or books." In December 1999 the second site was launched as Columbia Earthscape (www.earthscape.org). The site works much like CIAO, but with information on earth sciences. It publishes a quarterly magazine, Earth Affairs, that is only available online, and posts news and video from sources such as its partners, ABC News and the American Museum of Natural History. "The shared material may have significant scientific advantage beyond seeing a news report," says Paul Dolan, executive director of ABC News International and a board member of Columbia's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation (CERC). "ABC sends a helicopter to cover a volcano, and that picture may be 20 seconds on the evening news, but a volcanologist may want to look at it for 20 minutes, zooming in and out." In addition to the resources for scholars and policy-makers, the site is an educational resource both for schools and lay people who have access. "It's drawing a lot of interest from the high school level," Wittenberg says. "They say they want access to the real data, even if they have to provide more background" to their students. For example, high school classes are tapping into the "How an Earthquake Works" section, which is designed for undergraduate-level courses. Providing more in-depth information to non-experts is an aim shared by Fathom, the for-profit educational site started by Columbia. EPIC is providing some material for Fathom to use in its general-access areas. A third project is Gutenberg-e, which takes history dissertations that win electronic book awards from the American Historical Association and puts them online in an enriched format. Rather than just posting the text, Gutenberg-e gives the writers a semester off (with the help of a $20,000 grant from the AHA) and helps them develop interesting ways to present their material using the multimedia capabilities of the Internet. The site will be launched in the spring of 2001 and will be reachable by a link from www.epic.columbia.edu. For an e-book that is based on interviews with women in rural Africa, for example, the reader sees a montage of pictures of the villages on the title page, can access excerpts from other works, and may be able to see video or hear audio clips of the interviews. Six dissertations receive the award every year, specifically in fields of history that are becoming endangered. That is, with the relatively small readership of dissertations in book form and their high cost from academic publishers, fewer of them are making it into print. Gutenberg-e seeks to become an alternative way to publish scholarly work, though it may take some time before electronic publishing is as highly regarded as printing. "A lot of senior faculty on tenure review committees are concerned about online having the same weight as print," Wittenberg says. "But if they're peer-reviewed, they're peer-reviewed. We'll try to change how online publishing is viewed." That the award is given by the American Historical Association adds prestige to the project, Wittenberg says. She says she would like to see the site eventually expand to a place where people go for materials, similar to Earthscape and CIAO. The not-for-profit sites were launched with funding from the Provost's office as well as grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resource Coalition. They are designed to be self-supporting through subscription fees ranging from $295 (for individuals) to $1,200 per year. CIAO, starting its fourth year, already has achieved a level of self-support. EPIC is currently planning resource sites for several other fields. "I think universities and presses need to move in this direction," Wittenberg says. "The commercial sector will do it if we don't - and it won't be as good."
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
