Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn will speak next week at the Academic Book of the Future conference, “The Future Space of Bookselling.” The event will be held on June 3-5 at Bangor University in Wales.
Bonn’s talk is titled, “Scholarship is so demanding . . .”
The relatively recent and rapid development of digital and network based delivery and distribution tools and services for text-based media has enlarged the spaces of the academic book, moving it out of just the scholar’s bookshelf, the library, and the retail bookstore. Depending on the needs of the scholar-creator, the demands of the content, and the desires of the audience, long-form scholarship can come to us online, in print, permanently ensconced, available at the moment of demand, and in parallel or complementary print and digital editions. In this presentation we will explore some cases of publishers seeking to meet all these demands, both in print and online, including work undertaken at Michigan Publishing on reviving older (predigital) scholarship and to deploy the affordances of the Web to enrich new work. I will also report early findings from a major publishing research and production effort underway at University of Illinois seeking to discover just what scholars want to do with their books, anyway.
The Academic Book of the Future is a UK-based project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in collaboration with the British Library. Project researchers seek to determine how scholarly work in the arts and humanities may be produced, read, and preserved in the future.
Bonn's research interests include publishing, scholarly communication, networked communication, and the economics of information. At GSLIS, she teaches courses on the role of libraries in scholarly communication and publishing. She is editor of the Journal of Electronic Publishing.
Prior to her teaching appointment, Bonn served as the associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Library, with responsibility for publishing and scholarly communications initiatives, including the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office. Bonn also has been an assistant professor of English at institutions both in the United States and abroad. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, master's and doctoral degrees in American literature from SUNY Buffalo, and a master's in information and library science from the University of Michigan.