I think something similar came up in a discussion on the list some time ago having to do with wikipedia. I know that Dan has posted an entry on Caedmon there, but I am not sure about any 'academic' regulators going out and looking at the quality of any electronic publication - unless it is peer reviewed.
TEI should have something to say about this. (http://www.tei-c.org/) Dan is the one to talk to . However, the TEI guidelines are a good place to start, I think.
However, for academic quality, I don't know if there any people going out of their way to assess the quality of websites. I am an Anglo-Saxonist, and I know that there are many websites about the subject. Some people stick to the reliable ones by know academics. For example, there is one by Simon Keynes, a prominent historian from Cambridge, but many of the links he provides to other pages don't work. Also, there are many sites which have electronic texts and study guides, like Peter Baker's Old English website, which is basically a digital version of his book for free.
I tend to think that electronic projects, compared to traditional ones, are sometimes looked down upon simply because many people are not computer literate, or they do not have enough resources in their departments to do the project well. I do think, though, that electronic projects are becoming more collaborative due to the expertise of others, the costs, and the prestige. For example, we have a 3/4 million pound project at Manchester on medieval textiles which is collaboration with Birmingham and Manchester Met., there is the PACE project in London which is a collaboration with King's College and Cambridge, and the LangScapes project which is another King's College project, and the 12th century manuscripts project with Leicester and Leeds universities.
I think that what also makes these projects 'accepted' by the scholarly community is that many of them have an advisory board which is made of of a number of academics from various universities.
I probably didn't answer any of your questions, but there you go.
Best, Abdullah Alger
Quoting James Ginther ginthej@slu.edu:
My dept has begun a review of tenure requirements and one of the questions posed is whether (or how) electronic scholarship could become part of the research components of our tenure requirements. Peer review is the cornerstone of qualifying research production and so my colleagues are wondering if there are any established guidelines for peer review of web-based projects, or stand alone applications, that are not published by a traditional publisher. The issue is NOT about e-journals which retain the standard peer review process, but rather projects or applications that do not normally go through standard scholarly evaluations (although they often undergo more severe critique by the Academy in an informal manner).
Has anyone addressed this in their department or university? I am simply looking for some basic guidelines or sustained discussion on how to integrate the kind of research we do on this list, and/or the methods to demonstrate its comparative value to traditional forms of scholarship.
Many thanks Jim
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Dr James R. Ginther, PhD Assoc. Professor of Medieval Theology & Director of Graduate Studies Dept of Theological Studies St Louis University ginthej@slu.edu
dept: http://theology.slu.edu/ research: http://www.grosseteste.com/
"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." -Wernher von Braun