CORVALLIS, Ore. - Two ground-breaking works on relations between Native Americans and early Pacific Northwest settlers will be released online this week by Oregon State University in celebration of the fourth annual International Open Access Week.

The OSU Press and the OSU Center for Digital Scholarship and Services are making available Theodore Stern's two-volume works, "Chiefs and Chief Traders: Indian Relations at Fort Nez Percés, 1818-1855," and "Chiefs and Change in the Oregon Country." First published by OSU Press in the 1990s, the books have been out of print for several years.

The books are free online as high-resolution, searchable PDF files in the press's collection in the ScholarsArchive@OSU open access repository: http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/handle/1957/18857

"Chiefs and Chief Traders" offers a historical perspective on relations between fur traders and Northwest Native American groups, exploring both white and indigenous perspectives by utilizing a variety of primary sources, many used for the first time. The second volume, "Chiefs and Change" focuses on the changes that took place in the region as Hudson's Bay Company traders were followed by missionaries and later settlers. It also focuses on the devastating effects of attempts by government officials and missionaries to address what they called, "The Indian Problem."

In addition to these two open access monographs, the Center for Digital Scholarship and Services and the OSU Press will soon announce the online availability of other out-of-print and backlist OSU Press titles. These also will be available in the open access repository as soon as they are identified and scanned. The OSU Press and the Center for Digital Scholarship and Services will monitor online usage of the Stern volumes in order to determine the sustainability of making books available without restrictions. In the coming months, they will investigate making all of the online books available as print-on-demand editions.

"Once we learn how the public is utilizing these open access books and our print-on-demand services, we will explore the possibility of making all of our online titles available as print-on-demand in that form," said Michael Boock, head of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Services.

University Libraries helps advance research at the university through its open access repository ScholarsArchive@OSU, the sixth-ranked university open access repository in the United States. ScholarsArchive@OSU includes all theses and dissertations produced at the university since 2005, an increasing number of older theses and dissertations, faculty articles, conference proceedings and journals.

About the Center for Digital Scholarship and Services: The Center for Digital Scholarship and Services within the OSU Libraries provides services to support the creation, storage and use of digital scholarship and describes and organizes these and other library resources for access.

Source: 

Michael Boock, 541-737-9155

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