Supporting Digital Scholarship

“As we were making decisions in those first years of Project MUSE, it seemed to us that we had the opportunity to help a revolution take place. One goal was taking advantage of the available technology, and we were really trying to predict what would happened next, so MUSE would age well. But we also wanted to maintain scholarly traditions and values within the framework of the project’s new technology.

“There was a lot of discussion in those days about open access and open source software. We made a deliberate choice to not go with a commercial database. Instead we chose an open source MSQL database. It has since fallen by the wayside, but it was fast enough to do what we needed it to do.  It was free and you can see the source, but it was also part of a groundswell (that’s still with us, I believe), part of an attitude and philosophy.  We were a scholarly publisher, building on the shoulders of giants, open about our ideas. We were trying to manifest the best qualities of publishers and scholars, and trying to do that with technology that was compatible with those qualities. Open source suited our community and our purposes.

“Being able to say we used open source tools, including HTML, was an advantage compared to closed source commercial products. We created a lot of good will and we got a lot of free publicity by speaking at library conferences about that.  

“MUSE succeeded because it captured a need and met it effectively, and they continue to meet it effectively. Even today, every few months, somebody will mention an article to me, I’ll find it, and it’s from MUSE. Project MUSE is now part of the plumbing of the academic community and our country’s intellectual life. It was fun to be part of that inventive period, and I’m proud that it still exists.”

—Michael Jensen