The Living Books about Life (LiviBL) livingbooksaboutlife.org is a project funded by JISC as part of the eContent programme 2011.
The aim of the project is to develop a sustainable series of co-edited, electronic open access books about life -- with life understood both philosophically and biologically -- which provide a bridge between the humanities and the sciences. Those collaboratively-produced books repackage existing open access science-related research by clustering it around selected topics whose unifying theme is life: e.g., air, agriculture, bioethics, cognition, energy, human enhancement, neurology. The project offers an engaging interdisciplinary resource for teaching and researching relevant science issues in the humanities. Enhancing users’ experience of working with online materials, it expands upon a unique resource: the Culture Machine Liquid Books series liquidbooks.pbworks.com
Through initially publishing 22 such ‘living books about life’, the project partners aim to develop a sustainable model for creating and publishing, in a low-cost, low-tech manner, many more such books in the future -- books that will be shared on an open basis with other academic and non-academic institutions and individuals. These ‘books about life’ are themselves ‘living’, i.e., they are open to ongoing collaborative processes of editing, updating and commenting upon, by readers of all levels. As well as clustering the available science content on ‘life’ into a series of books, the project also aims to rethink ‘the book’ itself as a living, collaborative endeavour in the age of digital data, Web 2.0 and e-readers such as Kindle and iPad.
The (LiviBL) project is a collaboration between three academic institutions, Coventry University, Goldsmiths, the University of Kent, and the Open Humanities Press.