From: Melanie Schaffner <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 1 Mar 2018 15:11:33 -0500
Project MUSE Releases Beta Preview of New Platform Experience
Project MUSE invites you to preview our newly redesigned platform by
visiting our beta site at http://beta.muse.jhu.edu. The beta site is a
work in progress, with additional development and new functionality
occurring on an ongoing basis, and will run in parallel with our current
site (muse.jhu.edu) for the next several months leading up to the formal
release of the new site in mid-2018. A feedback form is available on the
beta site and comments, questions, and suggestions are encouraged.
In July 2016, MUSE was awarded a nearly $1 million, two-year grant from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to implement MUSE Open, a distribution
program for open access (OA) monographs in the humanities and social
sciences on the Project MUSE platform. The primary charge of the grant was
to further the OA monographs' usability, discoverability, and
accessibility, through an extension of and integration with the content
aggregation that already exists on MUSE. With support from the MUSE Open
grant, a new design and technological infrastructure for the platform was
developed, ensuring a more robust user experience for all of the
scholarship on MUSE, whether gated or open, with an elegantly intuitive
interface and a suite of tools focused on the researcher.
Among the exciting new features available in this early preview of the new
site are content footnotes and references presented "in-line" with the
associated text in a journal article or book chapter, additional search
facets for book series and thematic journal issues, and the launch of new
"My MUSE" personalized accounts. Users who create an account will be able
to save searches, create a library of their favorite MUSE materials
(books, chapters, journals, issues, or articles), generate citations for
all or selected items in their library, and search within their personal
library. These, along with many other features of the new interface, were
developed through an extensive, iterative research and design process
conducted in collaboration with external user experience innovators
Brilliant Experience, in which multiple rounds of user testing revealed
desires for simplicity, consistency, and more personalized interactions
with content.
Also available now is a sample set of open access monographs in
browser-native HTML5 format. A key goal of the MUSE Open grant was to
"unlock" the OA books from the commonly-available PDF format, allowing not
only a browser-based reading experience with no additional software
required, but also much greater flexibility for creating content
connections and supporting conversations around the scholarship. MUSE
embraced community-supported open source software from the Collaborative
Knowledge Foundation to create new workflows for publishers to submit epub
files and for those files to be transformed into HTML5 for dissemination
on MUSE. A further benefit of the new system is that it may be used for
any book for which a publisher is able to submit epub, whether gated or
open on MUSE.
Cornell University Press' The Taming of Evolution
(http://beta.muse.jhu.edu/book/57420), a foundational anthropology title
recently digitized and made open access through the National Endowment for
the Humanities' (NEH) "Humanities Open Book" grant initiative, is just one
example of the new format OA books on display. When MUSE's new platform is
released in mid-2018, we expect to host over 300 additional open access
monographs in HTML5. All of the open access books will be fully supported
with discovery tools including MARC records, KBART availability, and
metadata distribution and linking, and will be preserved with support from
PORTICO and LOCKSS.
The beta site will run in tandem with the current MUSE site while we
continue development, collect additional user feedback, and make
refinements prior to launch. Any user access to content on the beta site
which occurs via institutional authentication to subscribed or owned
resources will be included in the institution’s standard COUNTER usage
reporting. Please note that IP authentication and campus proxy access are
currently supported on the beta site, but Shibboleth authentication is not
yet implemented on beta. Please submit all feedback and questions
regarding the beta site via the embedded feedback form, and watch for
further announcements and opportunities to learn more about the platform
upgrade.
Melanie Schaffner
Director, Sales and Marketing
Project MUSE
The Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 N Charles St.
Baltimore, MD 21218 USA
P 410-516-3846
F 410-516-3846
[log in to unmask]
http://muse.jhu.edu
Find us on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ProjectMUSE
Follow us on Twitter: @ProjectMUSE
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