Supporting Digital Scholarship
Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires
25 MUSE Makers
As JHUP director and MUSE cheerleader, Jim Jordan shepherded the transition from a Hopkins-only program to a resource for the broader university press community.
“Having come from the fractious world of commercial publishing, for me the exciting aspect of Project MUSE was the prospect of a group of independent publishers working together to create a common platform for scholarship. As a book publisher, I knew next to nothing about journals publishing. The success of MUSE was largely due to Marie Hansen’s widely respected expertise, Robbie Dircks’ financial acumen, and the day to day work of a lot of dedicated people at JHUP. MUSE’s growth was eventually accelerated by Aileen McHugh’s expert administration. Working with the equivalent of a wooden needle and a thousand yards of yarn, Michael Jensen somehow managed in his spare time to weave together a mechanism for generating HTML pages from multiple file types, thereby insuring a painless transition of print-based content to a searchable online incarnation.
“The early success reflected a genuinely enthusiastic collaboration of publishers and librarians to accelerate patron access to archival materials as well as new scholarship published for the first time simultaneously in print and online. The rapid growth of the collection beginning with the Hopkins core was essential to its success.
“The biggest challenge I recall in the early days was overcoming a widespread fear that online publishing would make print content obsolete but not compensate the early publishers for their sunk print costs. Early iterations of the project sought to reassure publishers by compensating them for a period of time for their print losses. Over time, as the transition to online usage became better established and demand grew, the issue largely resolved itself.
“MUSE served an emerging need for electronic access to scholarship at just the right time; it was affordable and easily accessible; it modeled an essential collaboration among publishers, libraries, and scholars that has served the community well. MUSE has gone far beyond what it was in those early days, and I feel fortunate to have been a part of it.”
—Jim Jordan
