The Institute for the Future of the Book has done it again. Last month, this group published a blog edition of The Iraq Study Group Report based on a customization of the WordPress blogging software. It was done in collaboration with Lewis Lapham, editor emeritus of Harper's Magazine and current editor of Lapham's Quarterly. The Institute's version of WordPress, currently in testing phase, publishes texts and allows for paragraph-by-paragraph comments. This produces an annotated edition of the text that is, as an Institute's blog posting puts it, in "Talmudic fashion with commentary accreting around the central text."

I mentioned this project a couple of weeks ago, and thought I'd bring it up again because of its impressive new offering: an annotated edition of The President's Address to the Nation of January 10, which outlined a new strategy for Iraq. The blog's commentators are invited by Lapham's Quarterly and also may apply to the journal's staff to become contributors.

The overall project, called Operation Iraqi Quagmire, is an exercise in what the Institute's January 11th announcement calls ""a journalistic experiment and a gesture toward a new way of handling public documents in a networked democracy".

Note: these documents are currently best viewed using Firefox.

This is such a great idea. The text was published on the blog on the day after Bush's speech, so the project has a high impact factor. The accumulation of comments over time will be interesting to watch, and the format will preserve the comments for current and future observers.

It's fun to imagine various ways in which this kind of tool could be useful to the academic enterprise. To give just one example, my library has an online Reference Collection that includes a page with links to sites about Topics in the News. As a Library 1.0 effort, this has worked well over the years. Now, let's take it up a notch. Since the library has a blogging program, why not start a current events blog with postings written by library and teaching faculty that invite comments from the university community. It's a good bet that our students are already blogging and commenting on these topics on sites outside of the University. Let's position the library more at the center of their intellectual and civic growth by providing a forum in which to express their ideas about recent events and engage in discussion with faculty and their peers.

I hope that someday other blog customizations will be developed and be made widely available. This type of software could be an enormously useful teaching tool on campus. Use for current events is just one idea. The software could also be used for soliciting comments on a library's strategic plan, on any number of working or published documents on campus, on copyright-free texts that are offered for class discussion. In the meantime, we can get our inspiration from this very interesting project.