It’s fun to watch the birth of a brand new blog, and a promising new blog is Kristin Lawrence on scholarly publishing.

In a post titled on text taking precedence, she writes

Moving to a text-takes-precedence model, where design gives way to an XML style sheet and printing is offered only on demand and serves just to hold the book together, means we have to focus on content and use and search, not aesthetics.

This reminds me a lot of my days in academic libraries. But over the last few years I’ve come to a rather opposite conclusion. For 15 years I specialized in digital libraries, which primarily is focused on content and search retrieval.

After a move to South America I got involved with book design. For so long I tried to convince myself that the text-takes-precedence model had to work since, after all, that was the basis of everything I valued in developing digital libraries. But I always felt that something was missing and that was largely the aesthetics of digital content.

Most people involved in developing digital libraries and scholarly publishing are programmers, project managers, and administrators. Occasionally, someone in that crew will have learned a few things about Photoshop and labeled himself a graphic designer.

(And I will be the first to admit that I am no graphic designer but I do work with one).

If the future of publishing scholarly monographs is to store the content in XML and generate end-products in various formats via styles sheets, then it’s imperative that those involved in scholarly publishing connect with those who can bring quality design to those style sheets.

These days there are a ton of professional designers well versed in crafting great designs with style sheets. It can be done and it’s vital that individuals within the scholarly community don’t let programmers and administrators convince them that aesthetics does not matter.