Tag Archives: Anthropology Review Database (website)

Anthropology and open access book reviews: new and old projects

The AAA recently unveiled its new open access book review forum  the ‘Anthropology Book Forum’ (ABF) today. It’s an interesting project that has lots of positive things going for it: It’s open access, and the goal is to get book reviews out quickly. These are both good things. So I wish them luck.

It’s interesting to compare this new project to the Anthropology Review Database, an old (by web standards) initiative of Hugh Jarvis and Jack David Eller. The ‘ARD’ has been around for a long time, as you can tell from it’s ‘pre-css’ look. In some sense, the ARD is more of a success than the ABF may be. It’s been running with a quick-turnaround model for fifteen years. It also explicitly uses a creative commons license, which the ABF does not.

But in some senses, the ARD demonstrates the potential pitfalls of the ABF. For instance: how many readers had heard of the ARD before reading this post? The ARD’s current low profile suggests that the ABF will need to work hard to draw eyeballs. In fact, since Eller seems to be the only person still writing reviews for the site, it seems one possible future for the ABF is that it be read and written by extremely low amounts of people. Continue reading