Description

Panorama was initiated by the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA) as the first open-access, peer-reviewed electronic publication dedicated to U.S. art and visual culture. Now an established and valued resource with a rapidly expanding readership, Panorama plays a significant role in the field of American art as a nimble venue for new information and thoughtful analysis. In two issues annually, Panorama publishes scholarly articles, book and exhibition reviews, and short research notes; as important, it hosts Colloquium (formerly, The Bully Pulpit) a section pairing brief scholarly and polemical texts with responses from academics, curators, and critics. The journal is staffed by a team of volunteer editors—including three co-Executive Editors, one digital art history editor, and nine Section Editors—a paid managing editor, and a paid copy editor. Panorama has recently launched a digital art history (DAH) project to foster DAH research in American art, which is overseen by a Digital Art History Editor and a Project Manager, funded separately by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
The Henry Luce Foundation has provided four previous special grants to Panorama (2012, 2015, 2017, and 2018) The grants respectively funded: the launch of the journal; ongoing support for subventions to authors, enhanced website design, and archiving content; support for the managing editor, and host services at the University of Minnesota Library; and support for the two part-time positions of managing editor and copy editor, and subventions for rights and reproduction fees. Panorama now request ongoing operating support from 2021 to 2023 for the part­time managing editor and costs associated with the continued the hosting, archiving, and indexing services provided by University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing.
The AAP’s continuing support of the journal can be viewed an ongoing investment in the further expansion of effective information sharing in the field. This support is encouraged by the user metrics that Panorama staff actively track, including a dramatic increase in individual readers from 30,000 in 2019 to 54,000 in 2020. The journal now has 653 individual subscribers (there were 290 in 2018); and recorded that the four-week response to the November 2020 issue numbered 7,418 unique readers (7,121 of whom were new to our site) and almost 4,151 organic search referrals. (A copy of Panorama’s 2020 analytics is attached to the proposal file.) They attribute their success in part to expanded indexing, including in in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Panorama’s editors note that their open-access format took on even greater import during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing transition to remote learning and work across much of the world, when students, scholars, and general audiences availed themselves of the journal’s free content including fully illustrated, full-text PDFs.