Digital editing and publishing in the twenty-first century as a cooperative for small-scale editions

How might small-scale digital editions succeed in the future, and how is that future tied to the field of scholarly editing? The inclusion of more small digital editions has the potential to add numerous voices and perspectives to already existing digital and print editions that tend to centre on figures of national recognition. While these larger projects offer glimpses into social issues and individual stories beyond the recognizable names they focus on, they have historically been projects of white, English-speaking men. 

Larger projects have also been expensive to maintain and operate. Recognizing these twin realities and histories of publishing scholarly editions, the authors of this chapter have been working to transform the potential of editions through the approach of cooperative digital publishing. With support from the NHPRC and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, four digital editions, the John Quincy Adams (JQA) Digital Diary, the Ellen Swallow Richards Papers, the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Online Letters (CMSOL), and the Papers of Roger Brooke Taney along with the institutional support of the Massachusetts Historical Society and Northeastern University, have been in the process of building and creating a digital publishing cooperative. 

This essay will describe what cooperative publishing is and how it is transformational to the making of an edition. The essay will argue that the power of cooperative publishing is three-fold: 1) the sharing of resources, both financial and structural; 2) the collaboration of content expertise across a wide range of functions and topics; and 3) the support of a community striving for the same goal. 

The goal of the Primary Source Cooperative is to provide a platform, designed by consensus, to assist small editions led by scholars who might not otherwise have a portal for online publishing that is affordable and supportive. For each individual project, the Cooperative is a platform from which to receive input and guidance from other editors when questions of process or encoding arise, acting in lieu of staff who serve as internal sounding boards at larger projects. Uniting these four editions under one digital publishing platform will allow for federated searching by users that would never be possible if these projects were siloed on individual websites. When data from these four projects are combined, the resulting digital edition cooperative will provide free cross-searchable and chronologically-navigable access for its target user community, which moves beyond the traditional academic audience toward inclusion of students and educators at the middle school, high school, and undergraduate level.