DPLAfest 2017

Monographs are increasingly making the print-to-digital shift that journals started twenty years ago, but many online platforms for monographs arguably do not take full advantage of the digital environment. In October 2016, JSTOR Labs, an experimental platform development group at JSTOR, convened a group of scholars, librarians, and publishers to unpack the design issues around the presentation of digital monographs. The group proposed a set of principles for reimagining the presentation of monographs in order to improve the user experience and increase the value of ebooks to scholars and students. The proposed talk will introduce these principles, which are outlined in a new white paper (https://labs.jstor.org/download/ReimaginingtheMonographWhitePaper-DRAFT+FOR+COMMENT-2016-12-12.pdf), and will address discovery, evaluation, and interoperability challenges of the current scholarly ebook landscape. The presentation will also include a demonstration of a new, open-source prototype that the JSTOR Labs group has designed: a topic-based navigational aid for monographs called "Topicgraph."