The Seventeenth International Conference on Books, Publishing & Libraries

Abstract

Presenters discuss a digital publishing partnership between OSU Libraries and Calyx Press, Inc. A non-profit feminist press, Calyx brought many now-prominent authors to international attention, including the poet Sharon Olds and Nobel Laureate Wisława Szymborska. Supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, we aim to preserve Calyx Press titles and make them readily available in ebook formats with a Creative Commons license. The project relies on the strengths of each partner, embodying how a comparatively well-resourced public institution serves to amplify an important community non-profit, preserving its rich contributions to feminism and women’s movements. This project aligns with similar efforts such as the digitization of the feminist magazine Spare Rib (1972-1993) by the British Library and JISC. Digitization of feminist publications like these has the potential to attract new and returning generations of readers and scholars interested in twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist writing. Ideally we hope our digital collection will find new audiences and re-invigorate our long standing audience. Along the way, we have tussled with problematic questions of ownership, valuing the labor of creative workers, and digital rights. By sharing our experience thus far, we align with our feminist foresisters who were “contributing to the movement through the very act of producing a magazine” (Forster, 2016, p. 28). Sharing the complex concerns we’ve encountered along with our hopeful vision for aggregating and disseminating at-risk work of feminist authors and scholars, we are working to contribute to today’s digital feminist movement.