In early November, Senior Lecturer Maria Bonn presented a talk and served on a "Neapolitan" session panel at the 2016 Charleston Conference–Issues in Book and Serial Acquisition in Charleston, South Carolina. The conference is an annual gathering of librarians, publishers, electronic resource managers, consultants, and vendors of library materials.
Bonn gave the talk, "You Set the Scene: Three Faculty-centered Approaches to Digital Publishing from Mellon's 2014-2015 Scholarly Communications Initiative," with collaborators Liz Glass from Brown University and Sara Sikes from the University of Connecticut.
Abstract: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's 2014-2015 Scholarly Communications Initiative funded more than 13 projects of various sizes and orientations as part of an effort to strengthen the scholarly monograph publishing ecosystem in a time of increasing disruption. It has not always been obvious to onlookers if or how the projects funded by this experiment will ultimately connect, but a recent report from Simon Fraser University ("Reassembling Scholarly Communications: An Evaluation of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Monograph Initiative," May 2016) helps to clarify points of thematic alignment, overlap, and divergence among them. While many of the funded projects are explicitly based in university presses (with the goal of either enhancing existing monograph programs or developing digital capacity where little or none exists), three projects (those at Brown, the University of Connecticut, and the University of Illinois) are instead focused on developing digital publication capacity for faculty outside of the traditional press framework.
In the Neapolitan or mini-plenary session titled "Update on Industry Trends and Issues," Bonn served on a panel with Anthony Watkinson, principal consultant at CIBER Research; Rick Anderson, associate dean for collections and scholarly communication at the University of Utah; and Gary Price, founder/editor of infoDOCKET. The group of experts focused on “key, cutting-edge issues, trends, and initiatives that are poised to have major consequences” in librarianship.
In addition to the Charleston Conference, Bonn and Megan Senseney, research scientist for the iSchool's Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship, will present at the 2016 National Humanities Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. They will lead the Marketplace of Ideas session, "Working Together is Working Better? Challenges and Benefits of Collaborative Work in the Humanities." The conference, co-hosted with the Federation of State Humanities Councils, is the first in a series of three joint national meetings that will bring together the humanities community.
Bonn's research interests include publishing, scholarly communication, networked communication, and the economics of information. At the iSchool, she teaches courses on the role of libraries in scholarly communication and 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.