POSSIBLE NEW FUTURES FOR OUR JOURNAL ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

Religious Education, Winter 2005 by Hess, Mary E

LEVERAGING EXISTING CONTENT

The first of these-leveraging our existing content into digital arenas-could be an easy first step. The Teachers College Record (TCR) provides an interesting example of such a process. That journal, found on the Web at: http://www.tcrecord.org/, has organized a rich assortment of its previous published content around specific areas of interest that it makes available to more casual browsers of the Web. The content of the articles has not been changed, they still present rigorous scholarship, but the organizational links, the pathways by which people find the content, have multiplied and, in the process, have created a much more dense and hypertextual fabric. Each week the journal sends out an electronic announcement to people who choose to subscribe to the service in which it highlights a particular set of articles and notes book reviews that have been added to the site. The site also includes a mechanism allowing for community commenting, a kind of open forum in which people who come to a particular content area can post questions or responses.

Creating a richer web of access to our existing content in this way would also make it more likely that articles from the journal would show up in Web searches of particular questions. In addition, pulling together "content collections" of the sort that TCB regularly provides could stretch peoples understanding of the relevant issues by connecting them with content for which they might not otherwise have considered looking.

What would be involved in such a transformation of the journal? Clearly there are copyright issues to consider, as moving content into cyberspace may require some modification oi existing copyright agreements with authors. This is by no means an impossible task, however, and having the example of the Teachers College Record in front of us can point the way. Perhaps the major task of such a transformation would be the development of specific "content collections" and the hypertextual links among them that could structure an environment that provides context for our scholarship and makes it more accessible.

Even this challenge is not insurmountable, and would likely prove a very interesting and instructive exercise, perhaps even sufficient for a doctoral level thesis. A scholar could consider systematically our journal's entire output, its range of issues over the years, using an inductive methodology to cull arenas of meaning, to identify threads of significance, recurring themes, and so on, and then use those themes to organize assorted "content collections" to which we could draw people's attention. Even research that has clearly been superseded by more recent findings might remain interesting as historical context. Such a project would provide rich data for the graduate student working on it, but would also have a tangible and useful outcome if it led to ease of access on the Web.

Going a step further, beyond simply organizing "content collections," into an architecture that would enable community comment on the materials at the site-much as the Teachers College Record does with its "Community Discussion" section-would create a mechanism by which we could track the ways in which our site might provide a venue for pressing religious education discussions. That, in turn, could point toward new questions that scholars ought to Ix- addressing. Eventually, the "feedback loop" between the scholar and the community to which their scholarship is addressed might be made more organic and directly linked.