Profile of Charles W. Bailey, Jr.

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. is the publisher of Digital Scholarship and a noncommercial digital artist (ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8453-4402).

Bailey has over 47 years of information technology, digital publishing, and instructional technology experience, including 24 years of managerial experience in academic libraries. From 2004 to 2007, he was the Assistant Dean for Digital Library Planning and Development at the University of Houston Libraries. From 1987 to 2003, he served as Assistant Dean/Director for Systems at the University of Houston Libraries.

Previously, he served as Head, Systems and Research Services at the Health Sciences Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Systems Librarian at the Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University; User Documentation Specialist at the OCLC Online Computer Library Center; and Media Library Manager at the Learning Resources Center, SUNY College at Oswego.

Bailey has discussed his career in an interview in Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture. See Bailey’s vita for more details.

Bailey has been an open access publisher for over 34 years. In 1989, Bailey established PACS-L, a discussion list about public-access computers in libraries, and The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, the one of the first open access journals published on the Internet. He served as PACS-L Moderator until November 1991 and as Editor-in-Chief of The Public-Access Computer Systems Review until the end of 1996.

From October 1989 to September 1991, Bailey led the The Intelligent Reference Information System Project, which developed an expert system using Prolog. Copies of the system and its source code were sent free of charge to over 500 libraries at their request. This project was preceded by the Reference Expert system, which was developed using expert system shells.

In 1990, Bailey and Dana Rooks established Public-Access Computer Systems News, an electronic newsletter, and Bailey co-edited this publication until 1992.

In 1992, he founded the PACS-P mailing list for announcing the publication of selected e-serials, and he moderated this list until 2007.

In 1996, he established the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (SEPB), an open access book that was updated 80 times by 2011.

In 2001, he added the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, which announced relevant new publications, to SEPB. It was published through 2013.

In 2001, he was selected as a team member of Current Cites, and he has was a frequent contributor of reviews to this monthly e-serial until 2020.

In 2005, he published the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-prints and Open Access Journals with the Association of Research Libraries (also a website). This was followed by Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography which was published in 2010.

In 2005, Bailey established Digital Scholarship (http://digital-scholarship.org/), which provides information and commentary about artificial intelligence, digital copyright, digital curation, digital repository, open access, research data management, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. Digital Scholarship’s digital publications are open access. Its publications are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Digital Scholarship is a noncommercial publisher and it accepts no advertising.

At that time, he also established DigitalKoans, a weblog that covers the same topics as Digital Scholarship. From April 2005 through February 2024 DigitalKoans published over 16,000 posts.

From 4/20/2005 through 4/20/2024, Digital Scholarship had over 14.6 million visitors from 240 countries (excluding spiders).

From April 2005 through August 2023, Bailey published the following books and book supplements: the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008 Annual Edition (2009), Digital Scholarship 2009 (2010), Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A Bibliography (2010), the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography 2010 (2011), the Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography 2010 (2011), the Institutional Repository and ETD Bibliography 2011 (2011), the Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works (2012), the Digital Curation Bibliography: Preservation and Stewardship of Scholarly Works, 2012 Supplement (2013), and the Research Data Curation and Management Bibliography (2021).

He also published and updated the following bibliographies, webliographies, and weblogs: the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography (1996-2011), the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog (2001-2013), the Electronic Theses and Dissertations Bibliography (2005-2021), the Google Books Bibliography (2005-2011), the Institutional Repository Bibliography (2009-2011), the Open Access Journals Bibliography (2010), the Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography (2010-2011), the E-science and Academic Libraries Bibliography (2011), the Digital Curation Resource Guide (2012), the Research Data Curation Bibliography (2012-2019), the Altmetrics Bibliography (2013), the Transforming Peer Review Bibliography (2014), the Academic Library as Scholarly Publisher Bibliography (2018-2023), the Research Data Sharing and Reuse Bibliography (2021), the Research Data Publication and Citation Bibliography (2022), Digital Curation Certificate and Master's Degree Programs (2023), the Academic Libraries and Research Data Management Bibliography (2023), and the Artificial Intelligence and Libraries Bibliography (2023).

In 2011, he established the LinkedIn Digital Curation Group.

In 2010, Bailey was given a Best Content by an Individual Award by The Charleston Advisor. In 2003, he was named as one of Library Journals' "Movers & Shakers." In 1993, he was awarded the first LITA/Library Hi Tech Award for Outstanding Communication for Continuing Education in Library and Information Science. In 1992, Bailey received a Network Citizen Award from the Apple Library.

In 1973, Bailey won a Wallace Stevens Poetry Award. He is the author of The Cave of Hypnos: Early Poems, which includes several poems that won that award.

Bailey has written over 30 papers about artificial intelligence, digital copyright, institutional repositories, open access, scholarly communication, and other topics.

He has served on the editorial boards of Information Technology and Libraries, Library Software Review, and Reference Services Review. He was the founding Vice-Chairperson of the LITA Imagineering Interest Group.

Bailey is a digital artist, and he has made over 700 digital artworks freely available on social media sites, such as Flickr, under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses. A list of his artwoks that includes links to high resolution JPEG images on Flickr is available.

He holds Master’s degrees in information and library science and instructional media and technology.

You can contact him at: publisher at digital-scholarship.org.

You can follow Bailey at these URLs:

Digital Artist weblog: https://charleswbaileyjr.name and RSS feed: https://charleswbaileyjr.name/feed
DigitalKoans weblog: http://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/ and RSS feed: https://digital-scholarship.org/digitalkoans/feed/
Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/charleswbaileyjr/

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Digital Scholarship