SchlagerBlog

It’s fun to see our first title (Milestone Documents of American History) begin to make its way into libraries around the country. The Duggin Library Blog at Hanover College notes that the college has acquired our title (and accompanying online database) and has plans to acquire the next 4 titles in the series as well. Meanwhile, it’s been interesting to watch our WorldCat page to see the growing list of libraries that have purchased the title; this is far from a complete list, as many libraries do not link their holdings to WorldCat. Nevertheless, it does provide an interesting snapshot. It’s rather breathtaking to realize how different the reference industry operated when I joined it a couple of decades ago, back before there was an Internet to speak of. These days, librarians are working hard to reach out to their patrons via a wide range of Internet tools, from blogs to Facebook pages to Second Life.

Speaking of Internet tools, we are working feverishly to get our MilestoneDocuments.com companion site up and running; one of the fun aspects we are going to incorporate is a group blog. You’ll be hearing lots more about this later in the summer with the official launch of the site.

As we head into June, I’m reminded that the annual meeting of the American Library Association is coming up at the end of the month. This year’s convention is in Anaheim; apparently the convention center is directly across from Disneyland. I doubt I’ll have time to make my first visit to that park, but you never know.

In any event, I once again invite any librarians who are attending the convention to e-mail me if you’d like to hear more about our Milestone Documents series or about our publishing efforts in general. For my part, I love to hear librarians talk about their institutions, their patrons, the kinds of reference books and databases they are purchasing, pet peeves, and so forth. There are always some great discussion meetings too; one to look forward to this year is called “The Future of Electronic Reference Publishing: A View from the Top.” The meeting will be moderated by Sue Polanka (chair of the editorial board of Reference Books Bulletin and author of the No Shelf Required blog) and will feature input from executives of several big reference companies (emphasis on “big,” which thus disqualifies us!), including Gale Cengage, Oxford University Press, Sage, and Encyclopaedia Britannica.

William Badke, a librarian at Trinity Western University, has recently written an article for Online about the “elephant in the room” of the publishing industry (his phrase): Wikipedia. His argument is well reasoned and articulate. Essentially, he remarks that the current attitude of publishers, librarians, and academics toward Wikipedia is tatamount to ignoring the elephant in the room. Millions of students and other researchers routinely use it now, regardless of exhortations not to do so. What’s more, he says, there is much to like about Wikipedia. The challenge is in finding a way to acknowledge and use what is good about it while also helping researchers find their way to more authoritative, trusted sources–whether those sources are free or subscription-based. Although many of my publishing peers would prefer that Wikipedia just went away, I agree with Badke–Wikipedia is here to stay, and we better figure out an honest way to relate to it if we want to retain credibility with students. In reference publishing, that means focusing on those aspects where Wikipedia falls short–authority, accuracy, and editing. I believe there is room for both models in today’s (and tomorrow’s) information industry.

I realize it’s been an alarmingly long time since I’ve blogged here–an entire month, to be precise. But I’m happy to report that much work has been going on in the meanwhile here at Schlager Group. Most notably, we have reached a, er, milestone: this week we finally finished our work on Milestone Documents in American History, the first inaugural publication of our Schlager Group imprint. The book is now at the printer and will be available to libraries in late April. As we catch our collective breath in the coming weeks, I hope to resume a more normal blogging schedule. (Marcia Merryman-Means, who has also had her head completely buried in all things related to Milestones, has already rejoined the blogosphere with enthusiasm this week, posting several times over at her “Marcial Arts and Letters” blog.)

In the meantime, we are pleased to display our newest Milestones poster: 5 things you should know about black American history. This completes our initial set of 3 posters, and we are so excited to share them with librarians and teachers out there that we are extending our special poster offer to the end of June. That is, anyone who orders the book (and free online database) by the end of June will now receive a set of all 3 posters. Just fill out this form and return it to us. The posters will be useful throughout the school year, but especially in September (around Constitution Day), December (Pearl Harbor Day), and February (Black History month).

The Feb. 1 issue of Library Journal has an amusing article by Michael Bemis about various aspects of the reference publishing industry. (The article is available online here.) Among the practices he rails at are publishers who charge more for their e-books than for the print versions, publishers who release titles on arcane subjects, and reference titles on the same subject from multiple publishers.

I happen to agree with him about most of these items. I have previously blogged about the preponderance of multivolume world history encyclopedias that are cropping up lately. Obviously, the publishers have their own reasons for doing this, although it doesn’t appeal much to me. As for publishing on arcane topics, we deliberately avoided this model in choosing the subject for our first line of reference titles, our “Milestone Document” series. Our goal is to publish right in the heart of a basic subject of study, American and world history, and to do so from the vantage point of primary source document analysis–a practice that is fundamental to the study of history at the high school and college levels. We think we have come up with a model that is at once broad-based and accessible and yet at the same time fills a niche that has not been previously filled.

As for e-book pricing, here too Bemis makes compelling arguments–and they are nothing we haven’t heard before from reference librarians. Here, again, we are happy to be bucking the trends. Salem Press (our distribution partner) has hit upon a fantastic model for their upcoming Salem History database, in which our Milestone Documents series will appear. Libraries who buy the print version of our first title, Milestone Documents in American History, automatically receive free access to the electronic content for 3 years. There are virtually no restrictions on this electronic access, either. I’m surprised that Salem’s model (which they are also using for their Salem Health database) hasn’t received more press from the library media, but I’m sure it will come.

The Library of Congress announced yesterday that it has signed an agreement with UNESCO to move ahead with the World Digital Library Project. In reporting the story, the New York Times says that “other national libraries appear poised to cooperate in the venture.” This is apparently true even for European national libraries, which have other similar efforts underway already.

The World Digital Library Project is modeled after the LOC’s own American Memory project, which I’ve been using this week to find relevant images for our upcoming Milestone Documents in American History. It’s been fascinating to see digital images of documents ranging from George Washington’s first state of the union address (which, alas, is listed as 1789 in the archives but happened in 1790, as the digital image of the hand-written manuscript proves) to Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Exposition speech of 1895, both of which will be featured in our new publication. I even found some really interesting material related to Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech of 1858, including letters from friends and colleagues congratulating him on his speech. As I happen to be reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals at the moment (a long haul but a really good read, by the way), the Lincoln papers are great fun to explore. In any event, I for one look very much forward to the efforts of the World Digital Library Project. I know I am a history buff and am biased, but this kind of material is so fascinating. That’s the quality we’ll attempt to convey in our Milestone Documents series.

This week I contacted the Library of Congress to ask whether our upcoming Milestone Documents in American History would be available for their CIP (cataloguing in publication) program. As part of this program, the LOC creates a bibliographic record for unpublished books that facilitates their processing by libraries and book dealers when the book is published. (The bibliographic record is printed in the book’s front matter.) Unfortunately, I was told that our title was not eligible, because Schlager Group hasn’t yet published books by three different authors. In our case, this requirement is both annoying and unwise, since our book will be sold only to libraries and will indeed find its way into thousands of them–and those librarians would benefit from a CIP record. But what can you do? Apparently, we might be able to create our own bibliographic record to assist librarians, or we can wait until publication, at which time librarians who receive the first copies will create the needed record. I’ll be polling our librarian advisers to ask for advice on how to proceed, but the LOC rules and regulations are a little arcane and exasperating.

On another front, though, libraries are saving the day. In a few cases, we have struggled with finding the full text of the primary source documents that we’ll be discussing (and reprinting) in our set. Two that challenged us this week were the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the GI Bill (formally, Servicemen’s Readjustment Act) of 1944. Full-text transcriptions are simply not available on the Web, and buying printed volumes that contain the transcriptions is not an option, either, because those government volumes have long since gone out of print and are no longer available. In the case of Taft-Hartley, the author writing the analysis of the act was able to work with his university’s library to get a full-text version. In the case of the GI Bill, the government documents librarians at Texas Tech University (a federal depository for government publications) are kindly scanning and e-mailing the full text to us.

The point of this blog post? We may not always love the rules and regulations of the library establishment, but we love librarians!

On Friday the National Coalition for History issued a release calling for historians and archivists to pressure Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky to allow the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007 to come up for a vote on the Senate floor. Essentially, as I understand it, this bill would nullify Executive Order 13233, issued by President Bush in 2001. That order gave former and current presidents new authority to delay the release of records indefinitely, or withhold them altogether. Many members of Congress are now seeking to overturn that order and restore the law that mandates a timely release of presidential records; the House has already passed its version of the bill by a wide margin.

Interestingly, but I suppose not surprisingly, this battle is related to the controversy at Southern Methodist University over the proposed Bush presidential library and think tank. A number of SMU scholars have argued that the university should not agree to house the library and think tank unless Bush rescinds his executive order. Read more about the SMU faculty controversy here.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. But in any event, it’s nice to see the NCH–and historians in general–taking a public stance on this important issue.

I apologize for the long interval since my last post. We have been working hard to get our redesigned corporate Web site up and running and to announce our new venture. It appears that I’ll finally be able to take the wraps off of this venture early next week, and my hope is that our Web site will follow shortly thereafter.

In the meantime, here is an update on the George W. Bush Presidential Library story. The library committee has chosen Robert A. M. Stern Architects to design the new library and the accompanying “research institute.” Like all buildings on the campus of Southern Methodist University, the design will be neo-Georgian in appearance. Here is an article about the selection of Stern for the job.

Steven Cohen’s LibraryStuff blog alerted me to an article in the Boston Globe about library statistics in Massachusetts over the past decade. The statistics show large increases in circulation, interlibrary loan requests, and requests for audiovisual materials. Although little comment is made about use of reference sources, either online or in print (since reference sources don’t circulate), the article does mention that use of computer rooms–in which users, in part, can access electronic databases that the library has subscribed to–has also surged. All of this took place in a period of funding difficulty, especially since 2003, which makes it particularly welcome news for libraries and publishers alike.