Subject: Cover to Cover: the Modernist Journals Project
From: "Stern, David" <David_Stern_at_brown.edu>
Cover to Cover: the Modernist Journals Project
As the culture of scholarship becomes more digital, librarians and
scholars have begun working together more closely to provide the
resources needed for effective study and teaching. One of these
efforts is the Modernist Journals Project (MJP), jointly sponsored by
Brown University and the University of Tulsa, which is providing
scholars and students with digital editions of key periodicals
published during the rise of modernism (1890-1922). Reflective of
recent scholarly trends, the MJP’s mission includes digitizing entire
issues of modernist journals, including covers, preliminary matter and
advertisements, thus providing further evidence as to readership, the
commercial milieu of the time, and the interplay of graphic images to
text and content. To date, the MJP, working with university
libraries at Brown, Tulsa, Princeton, Chicago, and Wisconsin, has made
available cover-to-cover digital editions of magazines such as Blast,
Poetry, and Scribner’s for use by scholars and students everywhere,
supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
The Project’s end date is established as 1922 for both intellectual
and practical reasons: the practical reason is that copyright becomes
an issue with publications from 1923 onward; the intellectual reason
is that most scholars consider modernism to be fully fledged in 1922,
a date marked by the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S.
Eliot's The Waste Land; thus the project focuses on the rise of modernism.
In the course of its work, the Modernist Journals Project has shone
light on a significant historical deficiency in the holdings of these
periodicals in libraries nationally. As Ellen Gruber Garvey noted in
1999 in The Serials Librarian (37.1 p. 83), library holdings of
periodicals from this era often lack the paper covers and advertising
pages, which were routinely discarded during binding. This is
especially the case with the large-circulation magazines, whose issues
frequently included a hundred or more pages of advertisements, but it
is also the case with the “little” magazines, which although they may
have included fewer advertising pages, the loss of these
advertisements is nevertheless dismaying. As the study of modernism
has begun to emphasize the intricate relationship between art and the
commodities that shaped the culture of the time, this lacuna in the
historical record has become more critical and more damaging to
scholarship.
The Project’s work as been greatly hindered by the difficulty of
locating complete, cover to cover, runs of original issues of
modernist periodicals. Library catalogs typically do not distinguish
between cover-to-cover runs of magazines and those that have had the
advertisements stripped out. Without actually looking at the library
holdings, in most cases, it is not possible to tell if they are
complete. The work of other digital projects reflects this
difficulty: both the Making of America Project and ProQuest
periodicals, are either totally lacking or seriously incomplete with
respect to the advertising in periodicals of this period.
What is needed, for the work of the Modernist Journal Project and the
work of others in this field, is a physical survey of holdings of the
periodicals of greatest interest to modernists, both the “little
magazines” and the large circulation periodicals, to produce a union
list of cover-to-cover holdings of magazines from this period. While
there are potentially hundreds of magazines of some literary or
artistic interest that were published during this period, the
Modernist Journals Project has compiled a core list of approximately
35 titles that are critical to the study of modernism.
Brown University Library now offers to coordinate efforts to locate
cover-to-cover holdings of the titles on this core list of periodicals
in libraries nationally. We invite interested institutions to work
with us to survey holdings of titles and to contribute this
information to a database which Brown will maintain. We will create
an OCLC series entry in order to provide a federated search
capability. Successive phases of the project will include the
digitization of these periodicals, and making them publicly available
to students and scholars. Attached is a list of some important titles
identified by the MJP.
In order to participate, or for further information, please contact
David Stern, Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources at
Brown University. (David_Stern_at_brown.edu)
Modernist Journals Project:
http://dl.lib.brown.edu:8081/exist/mjp/index.xml
David Stern
Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Resources
Brown University
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library
10 Prospect Street / Box A
Providence, RI 02912
phone: (401) 863-7785
fax: (401) 863-3384
email: David_Stern_at_brown.edu
Received on Wed Jun 11 2008 - 01:38:49 EDT