LitTAP Blog

Here’s the Q&A response from Billy Merrell, Web Developer for the Academy of American Poets.

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1. How has your literary org changed over the past 5-10 years due to technology changes?

As the internet has become an increasingly valid and now necessary means of serving our various audiences, the Academy of American Poets has shifted priorities to embrace Poets.org as a priority program with transformative posibilities for reaching new readers nationally–much more than the bulletin board for Academy programs it was when the site was launched in 1996.

2. What do you feel new technologies offer you a chance to do that you could not before? What do you wish you could do, if you had limitless resources?

Poets.org is now our primary way of interacting with general readers–some of which know who we are as an organization, and others who may not know who or what the “Academy of American Poets” is.

The web also allows for free, interactive exploration possibilities, as well as more democratic curations of our content. If we were able, Poets.org would dramatically increase the ways through which readers can share and discover poetry, specifically through integration with third party sites and networks, as well as through on-site advancements in how readers can personalize the Poets.org for their own purposes and interests.

3. What are the challenges you have faced, and expect to face in the future, in terms of technology?

The proliferation of web-based publishing has made us question much of how we obtain and promote content for Poets.org. Increased permissions costs, as well as a shift toward exclusive web rights, will continue to be a problem for a presenting organization that promotes existing content rather than publishing new work.

4. What other literary orgs do you feel use technology most successfully, and how?

I am most impressed by organizations which carefully select technologies that are most suited to their needs and the needs of their readers–and then who work within the limitations of what they’ve chosen to offer something robust and original.

I’m impressed, for example, by how Two Dollar Radio distributes their catalogs digitally, using the clickable PDF format as an alternative to static (and expensive!) print.

Not only can organizations serve their communities at a lower cost, but they can share their innovative spirit, become an integrated and real part of their readers’ daily lives, and sometimes exhibit the less public sides of their work.

5. How do you see the literary landscape in 10-20 years from now, given the possibilities that technology is opening up for us. How do you think technology might specifically effect literary orgs?

I cannot begin to fathom what the landscape will be like in 10 years, let alone 20. So much will depend on privacy, copyright, and intellectual property law for me to be comfortable even speculating.

I do believe, though, that as readers grow more and more comfortable with rapid, superficial distribution of links, status updates, and reading recommendations, the curatorial value of traffic analysis will increase–and it will be easier than ever to separate the lasting literature from language and reading that takes up most of the day.