SchlagerBlog

It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve decided to formalize a trend that has begun to dominate my (all-too-frequent) blog posts. Rather than writing about reference industry news and issues, I have been increasingly focused on education and classroom items, especially as they relate to using technology in the classroom. As a result, the new subtitle for this blog: “History. Education. Technology.” won’t surprise any of you. You will also notice some new links in the blogroll.

This evolution mirrors what is happening in our company. While our foundation and core have been in reference publishing, we are increasingly devoting time and energy to educational publishing via our Milestone Documents website. How do we help history educators teach? How do we help students learn? What new tools can we provide to improve history education and to assist the community of passionate teachers and historians? These are the questions that are occupying more and more of our time at Schlager Group, so it’s only natural that they should find their way into my blog posts.

A key word here is “technology.” Just as educators at all levels are struggling to figure out how to integrate technology tools into the classroom to enrich and improve the learning experience, we at Schlager Group are working hard to figure out how to adopt and deploy many of these same technologies in order to serve history teachers and students. This is no easy task. Like so many publishing companies, ours was built on a love of content, and it has been staffed by humanities grads who are steeped in the finest editorial tradition. This has allowed us to turn out award-winning materials of which we are rightly proud. At the same time, however, we have lacked the technical chops to properly position ourselves for the publishing revolution that is in full swing all around us.

To solve this problem, we have sought the expertise of others who can lead us into the future. These include Vector Media Group,  which has built a wonderful new platform for MilestoneDocuments.com and is helping us to refine our vision for the site even now. They also include River Valley Technologies, which has a long tradition in the scholarly journal marketplace but is now branching out to assist us in myriad ways. The company is based in India, but its director, Kaveh Bazargan, is based in the U.K. (I have seen the image of the bald, jet-setting publishing executive, and it isn’t me.) Through associations like these, we are fine-tuning, redirecting, and even revolutionizing our vision for our future.

That’s not to say that we have turned our back on the reference universe or the libraries and librarians that we love so much. Far from it. Even now, we are just days away from the publication of our next multivolume reference set, Milestone Documents in African American History, and deep in the trenches of producing a new set for the fall, Milestone Documents of World Religions. Like so many publishing companies, we are finding that we must operate in many spheres, and on many platforms, at once.

I do hope to write more frequent (and more interesting) blog posts, although I’m sure many of you have read that same sentiment on more blogs than you can count. It shouldn’t be difficult, given how many interesting things are happening at the intersection of history, education, and technology.

After a lengthy development process (is there any other kind?), we have finally launched version 2.0 of our MilestoneDocuments.com site. Over at the new site, you can read a welcome message from me that explains what the revamp is all about, the new content readers will find, and so forth.

When we released version 1.0 of the site about 18 months ago, I wrote here that the endeavor was admittedly an experiment. We wanted to see what kind of traffic we could draw, and what kind of per-article sales we could ring up, with a Web site built around our encyclopedia content but aimed squarely at students and teachers rather than librarians. That first version was indeed an experiment, and it looked it. It was hardly a design for the ages. Nonetheless, we learned a lot with that first incarnation, enough to make us want to invest in a more serious and robust iteration.

During the intervening 18 months, of course, the content industry–by which I mean book publishing, library reference publishing, Web publishing, textbook publishing, et al.–has been going through major upheavals, and there is no end in sight. As you would expect, we built the new site with many of these upheavals in mind, e.g. social media integration and a more nuanced treatment of the free/premium content mix that we are offering. At the same time, though, our eyes are still very much on the future, in the sense that more than anything, we see the site as a platform on which to launch future products aimed at students and teachers. Thus, expect to see further iterations as the educational publishing environment continues to change and as we continue to work on building new relationships with our audience.

But enough with the “vision thing.” I hope you will take a look at the new site and browse what we think is a pretty large amount of terrific content.

Happy new year, everyone. Like many people I’ve talked to, I looked forward to catching my breath over the holidays–resting, reflecting, and planning. Alas, there was a wee gap between that vision and my reality. The final days of December were spent in a frenzy of work to get Milestone Documents in World History off to the printer. And now, back in the office this week, I have barely blinked, only to find that somehow it’s already Thursday afternoon. How did that happen? Oy.

In any event, we’ve had a good start to the year. This month, two key library industry publications have given awards to Milestone Documents of American Leaders: Booklist (via their Editor’s Choice award) and Choice (via their Outstanding Academic Title award). This gives us a 1,000 batting percentage with our publications as it relates to this pair of awards: our first two titles have each won both awards. Thank you to the Booklist and Choice awards committees for this recognition!

In addition to our forthcoming Milestone Documents reference sets in 2010 (World History in February, African American History in May, and World Religions in October),  we are tremendously excited about the upcoming launch of the redesigned MilestoneDocuments.com. We’re aiming for a February release, and I hope to be able to offer some screen shots of the new design/layout in the near future.

Also on our horizon this year is a new series of teacher materials based on our Milestone Documents content. We’ve assembled a killer group of educators to help us conceptualize this series. Again, stay tuned for news about that endeavor.

As a publisher focusing on history materials, we are always on the lookout for news items that point back to some of the primary documents we feature in our reference sets. An upcoming movie that is getting a lot of attention is Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, about Nelson Mandela urging the South African rugby team to win a championship and help unify the nation in the wake of the end of apartheid. Mandela is, of course, a titanic figure on the world stage from the latter part of the twentieth century. In my mind (and I’m hardly alone in this), his achievement in leading South Africa away from a bloodbath of revenge and reprisal following his release from prison and election to the presidency is nothing short of astonishing. It’s no surprise, then, that his 1994 inaugural address is included in our forthcoming Milestone Documents in World History. The address is a microcosm of the mindset that Mandela brought to his task as president: healing, forgiveness, building toward the future.

“The time for the healing of wounds has come. The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come. The time to build is upon us.”

In his analysis of Mandela’s inaugural address, our contributor Christopher Saunders draws some interesting parallels between Mandela’s address and Barack Obama’s inaugural address. As Chris notes: “When Obama delivered his inaugural address, many commentators in South Africa referred it to a ‘Mandela moment’ and reminded their readers of Mandela’s speech.” Readers who want to study our complete analysis of Mandela’s inaugural address can do so upon publication in a few weeks, provided their library purchases the set. If that’s not the case, readers will be able to download the analysis at MilestoneDocuments.com.

Another historic document that is in the news this week is the 1887 Dawes Severalty Act, which broke the final Native American land holdings into individual parcels and essentially completed the dispossession of native landholders. This week,  the U.S. government announced that it had agreed to pay $3.4 billion to settle a longstanding lawsuit over its mismanagement of Indian land trusts–mismanagement that goes back to the Dawes Act in 1887. Anyone studying the history of land struggles between the U.S. government and American Indians should examine the Dawes Act. The full text can be read at MilestoneDocuments.com, and readers can also download our expert analysis for immediate access as well.

This kind of current events tie-in is soon going to get a major boost from us. As we move closer to the relaunch of the dramatically overhauled MilestoneDocuments.com, we’ll be starting a new continuous updating effort that will help readers stay up to date with historic documents in the news as well as new ones that are appearing. This effort will bring a fresh, continually updated face to our Web site and give educators a useful new tool with which to help students explore and understand the past.

I’m happy to announce that additional Milestone Documents articles are now available individually from Amazon.com. We’ve been selling articles from Milestone Documents in American History on Amazon (as well as on MilestoneDocuments.com) for about year, but this week we have begun to load articles from the companion set, Milestone Documents of American Leaders. Thus, you can download articles that explain and analyze the primary documents of figures ranging from John Adams to George W. Bush to Susan B. Anthony to Frederick Douglass–and 100 more. Each article sells for $6.99 and carries the brand name “DocNotes,” so an easy way to find an article is to search for “DocNotes” plus the person’s name.

Although we will continue to build our deluxe, comprehensive reference sets (and users are still urged to check their library before buying an individual DocNotes article), offering our content by the article in places like Amazon and MilestoneDocuments.com is important, too, because so many students and teachers are served by library systems that won’t have our sets. We really do want to offer users the ability to get our content in whatever place or technology suits them best–whether via the library or the Internet or their mobile phone. While we’ve only just begun to tap the potential of this “anytime, anywhere” model of content delivery, there is no doubt in my mind that it’s the wave of the future.

Once the redesign for MilestoneDocuments.com is launched in early 2010, users will be able to download the American Leaders articles from our site, too, along with articles from our forthcoming Milestone Documents in World History.

Over the weekend, Apple gave quick approval to our newest apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch: Obama Speeches and Analysis and Lincoln Speeches and Analysis. Each app costs $1.99. In each case, we offer the full text of 4 iconic speeches along with complete expert commentary of the speeches by the Lincoln scholar Paul Finkelman (also the executive editor for our Milestone Documents series of reference books) and the presidential historian Chester Pach (writing about Obama). There are all sorts of cool features with these apps, from note-taking to highlighting to e-mailing to auto-scrolling. Learn more about them at the App store or in iTunes. Of course, both Lincoln and Obama are also included in our U.S. Presidential Speeches app (available in $.99 and $9.99 versions).

This past weekend, we showcased our Milestone Documents product line with an exhibit booth at the annual conference of the Texas Council for the Social Studies. It was an extremely rewarding experience for us, as we were able to meet hundreds of educators from around the state and introduce them to our materials. To celebrate the occasion, we gave away 3 Milestone Documents reference sets each day. I’m pleased to announce the winners here:

Day 1 winners

• Sarah Cook, Rockwall ISD
• Raff Saeed, Galena Park ISD
• Amanda Jimenez, Texas Tech University

Day 2 winners

• Margaret Eubanks, Goose Greek CSID
• Marilyn Wooldridge, Fort Worth ISD
• Alberto Guajardo, United ISD

Each one of these winners will receive the Milestone Docs reference set of their choice, which includes a 4-volume print set and free online access for their entire school via the Salem History platform.

In addition to the print winners, we gave away 50 iPhone apps for our new U.S. Presidential Speeches app. Half of the winners will receive the basic version, which includes the full text of 90 famous presidential speeches; the other half will receive the pro version, which also includes our award-winning expert analysis of each speech.

It was truly an exciting weekend for all of us here at Schlager Group, and we are already looking forward to next year’s TCSS conference in Houston.

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).

I’m excited to announce that today we have released our first applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. “DocNotes: Presidential Speeches” is available in Basic ($.99) and Pro ($9.99) versions. The Basic version includes the full text of 90 famous presidential speeches in U.S. history, while the Pro version includes the full document texts plus a customized version of our award-winning expert commentary on each speech. You can learn more about the apps here, or you can search on “DocNotes” or “Presidential Speeches” in the App store.

There are a number of useful features in these apps, including bookmarking, highlighting, and note-taking. The Pro version allows you to e-mail a document (and accompanying analysis) with your inline notes and colored highlights.

These apps offer a promising new front in our business, one designed to make our content available to users wherever they are, in whatever format is convenient. Our foundation remains our reference encyclopedias, with our individual expert commentary on MilestoneDocuments.com serving a complementary function for students and researchers whose libraries don’t buy our sets. Now, for the first time, our content is mobile. These apps offer a great research tool for history students as well as a convenient teaching tool for educators. Plus, for the history buff, they’re just fun to explore.

We’ve got many more apps in development, including ones on Supreme Court decisions, Barack Obama and Abe Lincoln, and teaching activities for U.S. and World History teachers. I’ll be sure to keep readers updated on our progress on this blog.

Today on MilestoneDocuments.com we are pleased to offer original analysis of Barack Obama’s inaugural address. This is a landmark for us in the sense that it’s the first time we’ve offered one of our e-docs for sale (and immediate download) that didn’t previously appear in one of our print encyclopedias. Although the Obama article follows the exact same format as the entries in Milestone Documents in American History, it was written well after that set was published. However, the advantage of having a site like MilestoneDocuments.com is that we can do special offerings like the Obama piece.

The full text of Obama’s address is available for free, as is a time line of related events. The expert analysis of the address, comprising 5,000 words, and available for $6.99 (but free to any library that has purchased MDAH via Salem History), was written by the presidential historian Chester Pach of Ohio University. The following excerpt will give you a taste of what Dr. Pach’s analysis is like:

Obama tries to forestall criticism from those “who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans.” He maintains that such critics do not appreciate what Americans have accomplished at times “when imagination is joined to common purpose.” He also insists that his election shows that voters have repudiated the cynics’ “stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long.” In short, Obama maintains that change—both in national objectives and in how Americans achieve them—is essential to economic recovery.

Dr. Pach analyzes the complete address in this manner, and he also discusses the historical context of the speech, provides a brief biography of Obama, talks about the intended audience for the speech, and offers questions for further study and research. All in all, it’s a fascinating look at what Dr. Pach rightly calls “the most anticipated political speech of the first decade of the twenty-first century.”