The University of Hawaii has been awarded a $90,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to help digitize 100 out-of-print UH Press scholarly texts (like the one pictured above). The grant is part of the Humanities Open Book Program, a joint initiative by the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to make more scholarly works available to readers around the world.
“With the advent of digital technology,” said Trond Knutsen, UH Press digital publishing manager, “These works can become available to a new generation of readers.”
Some of these texts include topics of Asian studies, Pacific studies, linguistics, anthropology, and history, all of which have been selected based on their contemporary relevance, historical significance, and practical value for teaching and research.
Barbara Watson Andaya, chair of the UH Manoa Asian Studies Program, added that, “this initiative will be an enormous contribution to the advance of scholarship globally, but particularly for colleagues and students in places in Asia and the Pacific where libraries are inadequate and access to printed scholarly sources is difficult.”
The digitized titles will be available in 2018, on an open-access portal where users will be able to download them in EPUB and PDF formats. As well, some selected texts will be available to print on demand.
The UH Press already has over 800 titles online through their library e-book vendors, and more than 350 scholarly monographs through Hawaii scholarship online–a partnership with Oxford University Press and University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO).
“We hope this project will be only the beginning of a long-term effort to revitalize UH Press’s backlist,” said UH System President David Lassner. “The project will magnify the reach and influence of scholarly work done here at the UH, and support educational and cultural initiatives in the Asia and Pacific regions.”
Photo courtesy University of Hawaii
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