SchlagerBlog

Word comes that the September 15 issue of Booklist is now “live” at Booklist Online (subscription required) and will soon be in the mail. What this means for us is very exiting: a starred review of Milestone Documents in American History. Here’s a snippet: “Well written and superior in depth and quality, Milestone Documents in American History is an essential resource for reference collections.” I hope that interested librarians will read the full review either online or in print.

As usual, I must thank the terrific team of experts who created the content that is winning so many rave reviews. The work of these scholars (many of whom are blogging over at the Milestone Documents blog) has been singled out by several reviewers as illuminating, readable, and engaging. Those are essential qualities in historical writing aimed at students, and I’m glad that critics think that we delivered the goods.

I am reminded that tomorrow is September 11. As you might guess, our Doc of the Day over at the Milestone Documents blog will be George W. Bush’s Address to the nation of September 11, 2001.

Today, at long last, MilestoneDocuments.com went live. As excited as I am about this, I have no qualms admitting what I did in the title of this blog post: our new site is an experiment. Can a tiny company operating on a shoestring budget produce an efficient and attractive–and successful–Web site that offers affordable, pay-per-article access to our content? Will students and teachers looking for information on primary source documents find their way to our site? If so, will they find it compelling enough to purchase an article?

To date, very few companies in our industry (library reference book publishing) have dared to follow the pay-per-article route. Perhaps they feel trepidation about working in a “different” marketplace, one in which their existing customer networks are of no use. Perhaps they fear that the technology and cost hurdles are too high to justify the experiment.

All of these reasonse undoubtedly have merit. We were blessed in being able to start from scratch on so many levels, and also in having nothing to lose. We only began creating our content in 2007, so it was easy to use native XML from the start. We had no legacy content to worry about converting. And as we developed the concept for our content, we naturally asked ourselves how to disseminate that material as widely as possible in order to give ourselves the best chance at succeeding that we could. It’s been clear for some time that the vast majority of students and researchers prefer to start their information search on the Web. They don’t trek over to the library to search through a card catalogue. Even if they do look at their library’s card catalogue, they can’t see what’s in all of the expensive print and electronic reference sets that their library owns; that requires a separate, targeted search. And even if they could, the odds that their library would have purchased our content would never be great (even a bestseller these days only finds its way into a fairly small number of libraries). Given how much time and money we were going to spend to create our content, it seemed foolish to write off the vast majority of potential users. If we could create a simple, budget-conscious site whose offerings were “discoverable” via Google, why not do so? In the end, the potential positives easily outweighed the negatives.

The main thrust of our site is the expert analysis we offer on important primary documents from American history, but I should point out that the site also offers a great deal of free content, including the full texts of those primary documents, essential selected quotes, and simple chronologies to help students place the documents in context. We’ve also integrated our group blog of historical experts, and we’re in the process of launching a free e-newsletter aimed at history educators.  (Anyone who’s interested can already sign up via the MD.com home page.)

So while the site may not have the most elegant design ever seen or the fanciest technological bells and whistles,  it does do exactly what we hoped it would. Let’s see what becomes of it.

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.

There are a couple of new and interesting posts up at the Milestone Documents blog. First, Barry Alfonso has written a piece on William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech from 1896, noting that Bryan’s scorching piece makes our current political discourse seem very safe and generic by comparison. One of the striking things about studying historic documents from America’s past is realizing how harsh the rhetoric often was and how cutthroat the debate. In the present day we often think of our political discourse as being bitterly partisan, and the press is forever reinforcing the notion that our politics is hugely divided. If you read these older documents, you might come away with a different view.

To wit: Frederick Douglass’s “Fourth of July” speech from 1852, which, as Bradley Skelcher remarks in his new post on the speech, makes it clear that questioning the patriotism of those who criticize the country (or at least the country’s political establishment) is nothing new.

Both of these speeches contain eye-opening critical commentary. If you’re wondering what impact these speeches had when they were delivered, you can find out by reading the respective articles in Milestone Documents in American History through your local library. Our friends at Salem Press will soon unveil a tool that will allow you to see which libraries in your vicinity have purchased the set. If you are unable to find it, not to worry: you’ll shortly be able to download individual articles from the set at www.MilestoneDocuments.com. Watch this space for the announcement about when that site goes live.

As I have previously noted in this space, we are at work on a companion Web site for our “Milestone Documents” series, www.MilestoneDocuments.com. While that site is still under construction, I’m pleased today to announce that one component of the site has gone live: the Milestone Documents blog. This group blog brings together several dozen historians who have contributed to our encyclopedias. Our aim, as you might expect, is to create a vibrant discussion space related to primary source documents–their role in understanding history, their connection to current events, their relation to notable people from history, their use in the classroom, and so on. All of us here at Schlager Group are excited about this new blog and are anxious to see how the blog develops over time. I hope you’ll bookmark the site and/or subscribe to the blog feed (http://blog.milestonedocuments.com/feed/).

The first posts at the site include a discussion of the Northwest Ordinance and a commentary on censorship and the publishing industry, which of course involves the First Amendment. You’ll also see that we have added a “Doc of the Day” feature that functions essentially as a “This Day in History” concept; on occasion, we’ll note the anniversary dates of important primary documents from the past.

I’m off to Anaheim this weekend for the American Library Association Annual Convention. I will probably not be blogging, however. In the meantime, however, I hope you’ll check out the new blog site.