SchlagerBlog

Recently I had the good fortune to be interviewed by Mary Ellen Quinn of Booklist magazine for that publication’s “Bookmakers” section. That interview has just appeared in the magazine’s October 15 issue; it’s available online here.

The interview covers a lot of ground, from my founding of the company in 1997 to the launch of our reference imprint in 2007 to our creation of MilestoneDocuments.com to our new iPhone apps. We are working on multiple fronts to make our content available and attractive to students and teachers and history buffs wherever and however they want it, and I’m grateful to Mary Ellen and Booklist for giving me the chance to talk about our efforts.

Those readers who get the print version of the magazine will also see a full-page advertisement for our newest reference set, Milestone Documents of American Leaders, as well as a very positive review of that set (more on that in a separate blog post in the next day or so).

We recently got word that the Pennsylvania School Librarians Association recognized Milestone Documents in American History as one of its Best Reference Titles for 2008. And just as thrilling is the review of the set by Joyce Valenza, chair of the review committee for PSLA, who says that our title

 “has my vote for this year’s best reference.”

Of course, MDAH has received other awards and wonderful reviews, but it’s once again extremely gratifying to hear from librarians who “get” what we’re doing with our Milestone Documents series. We are of course the epitome of “biased,” but nonetheless we feel strongly about the appeal of our series. If your library serves high school or college history students, then every Milestone Documents title would be supremely useful to you. Today, history education is focused heavily on primary sources. And helping students understand primary sources is our mission.

Getting that word out to librarians around the country is as challenging as ever for any publisher, especially a small one like Schlager Group that works through a distributor (Salem Press). But I am heartened by the marketplace response to MDAH. Now, we face a long, anxious summer as we await reviews for our companion set, Milestone Documents of American Leaders. But with one successful title already under our belt, it’s a good kind of anxious. And as we look forward to the start of the next school year in August, we’ll be devoting significant time and energy to figuring out how to get our titles in front of more librarians–and how to help those librarians come up with simple, effective methods to increase classroom use of our titles.

Today, though, we love the Keystone State!

I’m pleased to announce that Andrea Betts and I will be attending the upcoming Texas Library Association annual convention. Even better, we’ll be giving away free posters (”5 Milestone Documents in Black American History”). These are beautiful, 24″ x 36″ full-color posters that will make a great addition to any classroom or library. To get a poster, just stop by the Salem Press booth (#1925) and drop off your card or give us your name/address, and we’ll mail you a poster after the convention is over. If you’d like to meet me and Andrea in person, note that we’ll be at the Salem booth on Wednesday, April 1, from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., and again on Thursday, April 2, from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. We look forward to meeting as many of you as possible!

On a side note, if you’re on Facebook, consider becoming a “fan” of our Milestone Documents page.

Over at the Milestone Documents blog, the Doc of the Day is one of the most famous speeches in American history: Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Pearl Harbor” speech. The photo here is of FDR signing the declaration of war against Japan, which he did a short while after delivering his address to Congress on December 8, 1941.

Today is a good day to revisit the press release we published last year at this time, “Five Things You Should Know about FDR’s Pearl Harbor Speech.” It’s a great tool for teachers and students, and in fact I should remind readers that we are offering a free 36 x 24 poster of these “Five Things” to any school or library that purchases Milestone Documents in American History. If you’ve previously purchased the title, not to worry: just call our distributor, Salem Press, and we’ll send along a poster anyway. The number is 800-221-1592.

The newest issue of Curriculum Connections, which is published as a supplement to School Library Journal, has an interesting interview with the historian Howard Zinn. Many of you will know him as the author of A People’s History of the United States, which has become a standard history textbook (or textbook alternative) in much of the country. Famous for his left-leaning politics and his work to popularize the stories of minorities, women, the powerless, etc., Zinn is a lightning rod for criticism. His Wikipedia page offers a useful window into his life, his work, and the controversy that surrounds him. Although I won’t venture any comment here about Zinn’s work, I like what Douglas Brinkley said about him on the Book TV “In Depth” program that I recently blogged about (and I paraphrase): If you only read his book and no others, you would be left with an unbalanced view of American history. But he is a terrific writer and historian who knows how to craft engaging, compelling narratives.

On another topic, I have been enthusiastically watching the PBS series “Spain…On the Road Again.” Part travelogue and part cooking show, it features Mario Batali and Gwyneth Paltrow (along with the New York Times writer Mark Bittman and the Spanish actress Claudia Bassols) as they travel around the country, sampling regional Spanish cuisine, seeing the sights, and having fun. The show is heaven for a hispanophile like myself, and you won’t be surprised to learn that I just ordered the companion book.  Who knew that Gwyneth Paltrow was fluent in Spanish? She speaks the language beautifully. Mario Batali is likewise fluent, although his accent leaves something to be desired. (For the record: I speak Spanish horribly.) It all makes me long to visit the country again, if not to live there again (as I did for a while in college).

Back to American history for a moment: Over at the Milestone Documents blog, we’ve launched a new category called “Spotlight.” From time to time we’ll focus on famous historial persons and tell you where to find information about them–and their primary sources–on the Web. It should provide an entertaining snapshot of some of the content that will find its way into our forthcoming Milestone Documents of American Leaders. Our first Spotlight post is on Andrew Jackson.

Over on his Digital Reference blog, Stephen Francoeur has written an interesting post titled “Reference e-books wishlist.” The post comes in response to a call by Sue Polanka on her No Shelf Required blog for librarians to comment on what they would like to see from electronic reference publishers. For the most part, Francoeur’s suggestions are not new, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth reading or contemplating. Quite the contrary. From gateway standardization to open Web “findability” to accessible user interfaces, these items are ones that I’m sure all reference publishers are working on and thinking about. I myself am passionate about figuring out how to make our content visible on the open Web; if users could see that we offered a terrific analysis of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and were alerted to the options for finding that analysis–for free through Salem History, if their library owns it, or for a small fee on our upcoming direct-to-consumer site (www.MilestoneDocuments.com)–then think how many more people would find their way to the content that we worked so hard to develop! It seems so simple, but alas that magical day isn’t here yet. However, I’m convinced that it’s not far off.

Since we are a tiny publisher that already relies on other publishers’ electronic platforms to ensure digital delivery of our content,  I have no problem with the call for someone to begin aggregating the digital resources of many different publishers on one platform. Gale, to name one, already does this to some extent with its Gale Virtual Reference Library, but for the most part the other heavyweights in the industry have preferred to carve out their own platforms rather than combine forces to offer a single unified platform. The reason is obvious: A publisher that offers its content on its own platform gets to keep all the revenue; a publisher that puts its content on someone else’s platform has to give up a big chunk of that revenue. Sure, the publisher that chooses an already built platform is saved the (considerable) expense of building its own, but is that enough to compensate for the reduced revenue year after year in the future? Not necessarily.

I was amused at Francoeur’s call for publishers to stop offering print reference. We’ve been hearing about the death of print reference for some time now, and it’s true that academic libraries in particular have been huge adopters of electronic reference. At the same time, so many libraries–including academic ones–continue to purchase print reference (even when an electronic version is available) that it’s impossible for most publishers to consider jettisoning print sources anytime in the near future. Is this a chicken-and-egg problem? If librarians would stop buying print reference, publishers would certainly stop offering it (and most would probably be happy to do so). And if publishers stopped offering print, then libraries would be forced to choose electronic sources. But for now, there is too much at stake for publishers to go cold turkey on this. And what about the patrons who prefer or need print? (They do exist.)

Nevertheless, Francoeur’s wish list is a good one, and I’m heartened by the fact that these same suggestions tend to crop up more and more in discussions between publishers and librarians. That can only mean that there is a growing consensus around these issues, and that kind of consensus usually presages genuine progress.

Booklist Online has posted a roundup of the “Future of Electronic Reference Publishing” panel discussion at the ALA convention in Anaheim. It appears to have been an interesting session, with input from executives from several big publishers of both print and electronic products: Gale Cengage, Sage, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Oxford University Press. As if their own recent publications (see here and here for examples) weren’t proof enough, it’s clear that these publishers recognize that their future success depends heavily on electronic publishing. I think that’s true for every reference publisher, no matter how large or small.

The American Library Association Web site has a brief video selection from the “Speaking Technically” discussion that took place in Anaheim last month. Among the database publishers represented on this panel were Gale Cengage, Alexander Street Press, Greenwood, Ebrary, EBSCO, and ProQuest. The video posted at the ALA site includes a portion of the question-and-answer session. At one point, the panelists were asked about enabling folksonomies in their database products; that is, allowing users to tag articles. Although this kind of “social tagging” is seen as a positive aspect of Web 2.0 publishing, most of the panelists expressed reservations about this, and for good reason, I think. Stephen Rhind-Tutt of Alexander Street Press talked about his company’s interest in creating an academic video database and about one major hurdle: the difficulty of creating effective search strategies for video content. (By the way, check out some of the articles/presentations by Rhind-Tutt available at the Alexander Street site.) Another topic of discussion was the age-old one of ensuring that library patrons are aware of the electronic databases that their library offers and know how to find and use them. As Jim Draper of Gale Cengage remarked (and I paraphrase), it’s heartbreaking when you build a product and no one uses it. This issue has bedeviled reference publishers since forever; print products have long been “invisible” to many library users. One fortunate thing about electronic publishing is that it gives us tools to ensure that users know where and how to find our content.

I only learned today that Matthew J. Bruccoli, a renowned F. Scott Fitzgerald scholar and one of the founders of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the classic reference series from Gale, passed away in early June. (Michael Rogers, in his Library Journal article about Bruccoli’s death, called the DLB “hands down the greatest literary reference work ever produced.”) Here is the New York Times obituary about Bruccoli.

When I was employed at Gale, I occasionally had the pleasure of working with the manuscript of one or another of the DLB volumes (which eventually grew into a multitude of some 400). I was always struck by the quality of the text and illustrations alike; reading an article about some important author, you were also treated to photographs of hand-written manuscript pages, book covers, and letters. In other words, the volumes offered a good deal of illuminating primary sources in addition to document analysis–just the kind of thing we are doing with our Milestone Documents series, only in a more focused way.

In recent years Bruccoli argued passionately that the decline in print reference as a library staple was harmful to libraries and to the civilization at large. (Here’s an old blog post I wrote about one such Bruccoli missive.) He obviously loved books, libraries, literature, and history, and his life’s work seems to have reflected these interests to the very end. I’m sorry I never knew him.

My trip to Anaheim for the ALA Annual Convention went smoothly. The weather was excellent (I had forgotten what it was like to eat outside in total comfort in the evening), and my business meetings were, as always, very useful. I spent a lot of time with our friends and partners at Salem Press, and those interactions merely reinforced my sense that Salem is in a good flow right now. They are releasing lots of desirable new products, including digital ones, and they have devised some rather groundbreaking sales offerings for those products. And, of course, they are working with some great young publishing companies to distribute compelling new titles.

Due to a conflict with my flight schedule, I missed the one discussion group that I had really wanted to attend: “The Future of Electronic Publishing,” moderated by Sue Polanka of Wright State University and author of the No Shelf Required blog. A summary of the discussion will apparently be available in the near future.

The Tools of Change for Publishing blog (part of the incredible O’Reilly empire) has a helpful recap of the convention, at least as it relates to issues of interest to publishers. Among other things, librarians are urging publishers to make sure that their resources can be found via Google and that their Web sites offer detailed product information, including reviews, which are critical for purchasing decisions.

I’m thankful the convention didn’t happen this past weekend; I would have been heartbroken to have missed the jaw-dropping day-long Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, which by general consensus was one of the greatest tennis matches of all time. I don’t have any trips planned over the next month, which is a good thing, as there is plenty here to keep me busy–including our move to a new office space and continued work on Milestone Documents of American Leaders and our new digital history offerings.