home / about nyu press / note from the director

The past year has been full of demanding and exciting changes for university press publishing. New technology continues to become increasingly important to scholarly communication—even as demand for and sales of our printed books rise to record levels.

Social networking sites are fast becoming the next phase in the digital revolution. As publishers, we must find new and innovative ways of reaching and connecting with readers through new vehicles such as wikis, blogs, and content postings. See the blog for our book Keywords for American Cultural Studies here for an example of how printed books and online media can complement each other.

Last July saw the release of the Ithaka consulting group's much-anticipated report "University Publishing in the Digital Age." It examines the relationships among universities, their presses, and their libraries. The report suggests that these three groups are too often isolated from one another and that if academic publishing is to thrive in the coming years new forms of collaboration will be essential. NYU Press and the NYU Libraries have already made progress on many of these recommendations, including focusing on digital availability and distribution of the Press’s books.

January 2008 also saw the opening of the new Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing, run jointly by the NYU Press and the NYU Libraries, to explore nontraditional models of publishing and help faculty explore new ways of sharing their work. The Press has also begun to better align itself with the key academic strengths of NYU as a whole. As part of this initiative, we recently appointed seven new members to our distinguished Faculty Advisory Board.

The past months have been important to NYU Press in a number of other ways. The Press and our authors won a number of distinguished academic book awards. We also secured a five-year $1.3 million grant from The Andrew Mellon Foundation to support a collaborative publishing project called the American Literatures Initiative. And two major, multivolume projects moved forward: a new three-volume history of the Jews of New York City titled City of Promises, edited by Deborah Dash Moore and the classic and long out-of-print NYU Press series the Collected Works of Walt Whitman. These Whitman books illustrate again the tremendous rewards to be had when scholarship and new technology are combined.

—Steve Maikowski, Director