Planned Obsolescence

Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescenceis both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and an argument for re-conceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changes-- especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimedia--necessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin. Confronting a change-averse academy, she insists that before we can successfully change the systems through which we disseminate research, scholars must re-evaluate their ways of working--how they research, write, and review--while administrators must reconsider the purposes of publishing and the role it plays within the university. pringing from original research as well as Fitzpatrick's own hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication through MediaCommons, the digital scholarly network she co-founded, Planned Obsolescenceexplores all of these aspects of scholarly work, as well as issues surrounding the preservation of digital scholarship and the place of publishing within the structure of the contemporary university. Written in an approachable style designed to bring administrators and scholars into a conversation, Planned Obsolescenceexplores both symptom and cure to ensure that scholarly communication will remain vibrant and relevant in the digital future.

Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Scholarly Communication of the Modern Language Association and Professor of Media Studies (on leave) at Pomona College. She is the founding editor of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, and is the author of The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (2006). She has blogged at Planned Obsolescence since 2002.