from Project MUSE:
Project MUSE invites you to preview our newly redesigned platform by visiting our beta site. 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 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 intuitive scholar-informed 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 books 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, 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.
