Supporting Digital Scholarship

“I started working with MUSE when I was hired as a ‘metadata coordinator’ for the Eisenhower Library at John Hopkins in 1998. I was the first person in that position, and I worked on MUSE along with other library duties.

“MUSE became more and more my focus, and I joined the staff at JHUP full time in 2001. I brought Bill Kulp with me from the library, and he was our first full time indexer. I was kind of the resident librarian in the early days, and I’ve tried hard over the years to be the voice of our library customers. There has always been a good library/publisher balance at MUSE. Because the JHU library was involved from the start, we had library friendly policies that were cutting edge at the time.

“It’s important to remember that we were more than just a platform for our journals, we were also indexing them according to library standards. For each article, we would assign Library of Congress subject headings and create metadata that included name authority headings. Libraries loved that we were doing that. The LOC system is as inclusive as any system there is, and we were making life better for librarians and their users.

“Marie Hansen had taken the JHUP journals program and really built it, and that strong program was key to MUSE’s success. She really cared about MUSE and knew that it had to grow in order to be sustainable. Marie hired Melanie Schaffner, and Melanie figured out how to sell to library consortia. That was huge. There were a lot of Mellon projects that didn’t survive. But MUSE did!

“In the early years, the MUSE director selected the journals, but Aileen McHugh put me in charge of collection development. MUSE had astonishing growth in those first years, and at the beginning we were taking whatever the presses contributed. Publishers benefited from increasing royalty payments and libraries benefited from a quickly expanding, high-quality collection that remained favorably priced.

“As the collections evolved and MUSE became a more mature product, we able to accommodate fewer new journals every year. But that slower pace led to a selective and incredibly strong collection that grew at a rate that the libraries appreciated.

“I was proud to create our first collection development policy, and in 2015 I spearheaded the implementation of our hosted journals program, which created a second business model for adding journals to the platform. The opportunity for our publishers to host journals for a fixed fee not only created a new business model for MUSE, it also gave us a model that worked for open access publishing.

“There have been many other milestones and highlights, of course.

“I recall in 2000, after the collection expanded beyond Hopkins journals, we took the new publishing partners out for hard crabs here in Baltimore. The friendships and professional relationships that began in those years are still going strong.

“In 2012, we developed a book publishing model called Project MUSE Editions, but made a complete 180 when we became the UPCC partner. It was a huge amount of work, but we got it done!

“In 2019, we started selling articles and specific issues to individual customers. We have always tried to expand opportunities and find ways to do what our community needs.

“More than anything, when I think about the future for MUSE, I hope we can continue to innovate. There is no one solution to any problem, we have to try different things. We’ve got to keep looking for sustainable ways to bring in new content and create new business models. We are at a point where we really do need to think about what’s next, and MUSE has always been ready to do that!”

—Liz Brown

“It’s been such a treat to grow professionally alongside Liz for 20+ years. She was a great resource in our early years with regards to understanding not only libraries’ data and discovery needs, but also important philosophical and ethical concerns from a librarian perspective. I still sometimes hear her voice in my head when considering a product development question from the perspective of our clients’ needs. It did not surprise me that she would become an equally knowledgeable and adept advocate for our participating publishers as well, and the trust she has built among the community is fundamental to our growth and success.”

—Melanie Schaffner, Project MUSE staff member since 1996