Observing the author–editor relationship: recordkeeping and literary scholarship in dialogue

ABSTRACT

In the call for papers for this special issue, a lack of dialogue was noted between ‘archivists and literary scholars’. This article has arisen from a collaboration across that divide, between two individuals who between them embody multiple identities of archivist and publisher, archival and literary scholar. The purpose of this collaboration was to establish a common frame of reference which would encompass and give equal weight to the concerns and working contexts of both. To assist in this aim, both researchers agreed that neither the field of archives or of literary scholarship would be privileged. The focus in this study is on the relationship between the author and the editor within the academic publishing sector. With these parameters set as the starting point, research questions were drawn up from both perspectives to guide the project. These questions were, to some extent, addressed, but a more important outcome of the process was the development of a common frame of reference in which to continue the dialogue, through a broader and more abstract idea of the scholarly record and not just one of records as material resources for literary scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• Publishing
• archives
• scholarship
• records
• editors

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the editors at Cambridge University Press who gave us their time and their feedback, without which this research would not have been possible, and Kevin Taylor, the Director of Syndicate Affairs, for giving his approval for the research to take place.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Terry Cook, ‘Electronic Records, Paper Minds: The Revolution in Information Management and Archives in the Post-Custodial and Post-Modernist Era’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 22, no. 2, November 1994, pp. 300–28.

2. Robert Johnston and Kimberley Marwood, ‘Action Heritage: Research, Communities, Social Justice’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, vol. 23, no. 9, October 2017, pp. 816–31.

3. Helen Gardner, ‘The Academic Study of English Literature’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2, June 1959, p. 111.

4. Iain Stevenson, Book Makers: British Publishing in the Twentieth Century, The British Library, London, 2010, p. xviii.

5. Geoffrey Crossick, Monographs and Open Access: A Report to HEFCE, January 2015, p. 15, available at <http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20180322111256/http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/year/2015/monographs/>, accessed 6 November 2018.

6. Michael Jubb, ‘Academic Books and their Future’, June 2017, section 6.3.1, available at <https://academicbookfuture.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/academic-books-and-their-futures_jubb1.pdf>, accessed 6 November 2018.

7. Sue McKemmish and Michael Piggott, ‘Toward the Archival Multiverse: Challenging the Binary Opposition of the Personal and Corporate Archive in Modern Archival Theory and Practice’, Archivaria, vol. 76, Fall 2013, p. 115.

8. See for example: Catherine Hobbs, ‘The Character of Personal Archives: Reflections on the Value of Records of Individuals’, Archivaria, vol. 52, Fall 2001, pp. 126–35; Rob Fisher, ‘In Search of a Theory of Private Archives: The Foundational Writings of Jenkinson and Schellenberg Revisited’, Archivaria, vol. 67, Spring 2009, pp. 1–24; and Jennifer Meehan, ‘Rethinking Original Order and Personal Records’, Archivaria, vol. 70, Fall 2010, pp. 27–44.

9. ‘Pending’ refers to projects which have yet to go to the Press Syndicate for formal approval.

10. Centaur is the publisher’s in-house bibliographic database. It is used to manage the processes for books from pre-contract stages through to publication and post-publication stages.

11. Council on Library and Information Resources, ‘The Future of Email Archives: A Report from the Task Force on Technical Approaches for Email Archives’, August 2018, p. 3, available at <https://clir.wordpress.clir.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2018/08/CLIR-pub175.pdf>, accessed 15 January 2019.

12. Christopher J Prom, ‘Preserving Email’, Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Report 11, 1 December 2011, p. 16, available at <https://doi.org/10.7207/twr11-01>, accessed 15 January 2019.

13. Robert Darnton, ‘What is the History of Books?’ Daedalus, vol. 111, no. 3, Summer 1982, p. 76, available at <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024803>.

14. ibid.

15. Cambridge University Press Annual Report for the year ended 30 April 2018, p. 10, available at <https://www.cambridge.org/files/5015/3452/7174/Annual-Report-2018.pdf>, accessed 6 November 2018.

16. Jubb, section 6.3.1.

17. See for example Laura Millar Coles, Archival Gold: Managing and Preserving Publishers’ Records, Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing Press, Vancouver, 1989, and a follow-up article version: Laura Millar, The Story Behind the Book: Preserving Authors’ and Publishers’ Archives, Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing Press, Vancouver, 2009. Also articles such as Laura Millar, ‘Myths and Realities: Records and Archives Management for Publishers’, Journal of Scholarly Publishing, vol. 28, no. 1, October 1996, pp. 35–54.

18. Kent Underwood, ‘Archival Guidelines for the Music Publishing Industry’, Notes, vol. 52, no. 4, June 1996, p. 1112.

19. Susan Hamburger, ‘Rejected Manuscripts in Publishers’ Archives: Legal Rights and Access’, Journal of Archival Organization, vol. 9, no. 1, January 2011, pp. 45–58.

20. Millar, The Story Behind the Book, p. 8.

21. For more details of the records continuum model, see: Frank Upward, ‘Structuring the Records Continuum Part 1: Postcustodial Principles and Properties’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 24, no. 2, November 1996, pp. 268–85; Frank Upward, ‘Structuring the Records Continuum Part 2: Structuration Theory and Recordkeeping’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 25, no. 1, May 1997, pp. 10–35; and Frank Upward, ‘Modelling the Continuum as Paradigm Shift in Recordkeeping and Archiving Processes, and Beyond: A Personal Reflection’, Records Management Journal, vol. 10, no. 3, 2000, pp. 115–39.

22. Brian Lavoie, Eric Childress, Ricky Erway, Ixchel Faniel, Constance Malpas, Jennifer Schaffner and Titia van der Werf, The Evolving Scholarly Record, OCLC Research, Dublin, OH, 2014, available at <https://www.oclc.org/research/publications/library/2014/oclcresearch-evolving-scholarly-record-2014-overview.html>, accessed 15 January 2019.

23. Jerome McGann, A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014, pp. 131–2.

24. ibid., p. 20.

25. ibid., p. 82.

26. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, New York University Press, New York, 2011, p. 8.

27. Tom Mole, ‘The Academic Book as Socially-Embedded Media Artefact’, in Rebecca E Lyons and Samantha J Rayner (eds), The Academic Book of the Future, Palgrave, London, 2016, p. 12.

28. ibid., p. 15.

29. Richard D Altick, The Scholar Adventurers, The Free Press, New York, 1950, p. 318.

30. Fitzpatrick, p. 13.

31. Terry Cook, ‘What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift’, Archivaria, vol. 43, Spring 1997, p. 49.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenny Bunn

Jenny Bunn is a Lecturer at University College London (UCL). Having worked as an archivist in a variety of institutions including the Royal Bank of Scotland and The National Archives, she now acts as the Programme Director for the MA in Archives and Records Management. Both her research and teaching are concerned with shaping her profession’s response to and engagement with technology. She is a past Editor of Archives and Records and the current Chair of the Archives and Records Association’s Section for Archives and Technology.

Samantha J. Rayner

Samantha J. Rayner is a Reader in UCL’s Department of Information Studies. She is also Director of UCL’s Centre for Publishing, co-Director of the Bloomsbury CHAPTER (Communication History, Authorship, Publishing, Textual Editing and Reading), co-editor of the Academic Book of the Future BOOC (Book as Open Online Content) with UCL Press, Deputy Editor for the Journal of the International Arthurian Society, and teaches and researches publishing, bookselling and literary history. She is the General Editor for the Cambridge University Press Elements series on Publishing and Book Culture.