SchlagerBlog

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.

After a brief wait, we’re excited to see that reviews have begun to appear for Milestone Documents in American History, the first title published by our Schlager Group imprint and the first in our new “Milestone Documents” series. The first one is from Doug’s Student Reference Room, written by Doug Achterman and sponsored by Gale Cengage. The bottom line, according to Mr. Achterman: “Highly recommended for high school and academic libraries.” I’m happy to see that the review also makes note of the fact that libraries who purchase the print set get free access to the online database through Salem History for 3 years.

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.

A couple of people have sent me the link to the cover story in the latest issue of The Atlantic, which is called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” The article, written by Nicholas Carr, is a fascinating read. He comments on how the habits of browsing the Internet–skimming information and endlessly clicking on hyperlinks to follow new threads of thought–may well be altering our brains. (The title reference to Google is clever but not quite accurate; it’s really the Internet itself that is the issue, not Google.) One side effect of all this browsing and clicking may be that we are losing the capacity for sustained reading and the resulting thought patterns that can come from that level of concentration and focus.

As I said, the article is quite interesting. I urge you all to read it, but I also suggest that you look at the many contrarian views that are popping up on the Internet (surprise, surprise). For instance, take a look at this very fine Publishing 2.0 blog post by Scott Karp. He is quoted in the magazine article and thus has a somewhat personal beef to pick with Carr, but at the same time the anecdote he tells about how hard he had to work to read the article in question is quite telling. I can easily relate to Carr’s point about how difficult it is these days to focus on a long piece of writing without being distracted by a million other things–including the Internet–and I share his concern about what this means for our society. At the same time, as a book (and Web) publisher, I recognize and applaud Karp’s larger point about the need of print publishers to reorient themselves to the Web.  I don’t have any deeper insight into the issue than this facile post (that would require sustained thought, which I don’t have time for at the moment!), but these are interesting topics that anyone interested in Internet publishing (and reading in general) should explore.

The big news out of the reference world over the weekend was the announcement that Sage Publications had bought CQ Press. (Here’s the press release.) The owner of Congressional Quarterly had put CQ Press (its book-publishing division) up for sale earlier this year so that it could focus on its core Congressional Quarterly division. With so much private equity money drying up, I figured that another publisher would buy the press. Apparently, Sage will retain the CQ Press imprint and keep the staff in place in Washington, DC.

I’m happy to report that the online version of Milestone Documents in American History is now live on Salem History, the new digital platform from Salem Press.  I’ve spent some time this week inspecting the new site, and I can vouch for the ease of use and simplicity of navigation that the platform offers. Further, the material looks great on screen. Of course, libraries that buy the print version get the online version free (through 2011), and this gives users a lot of options when it comes to accessing our content. Although the content looks terrific in book form, we designed it so that it would also function beautifully in a less structured electronic form.

I’m also happy to report that our catalog record is now up on WorldCat, which makes it easy for users to see which libraries in their area offer the book and online database. So far only a few libraries have linked to the catalog record, but this is because the books are just now arriving at libraries. As each institution unpacks the box and catalogs the book, the list of available libraries will grow. Speaking of WorldCat, I read today that they just signed a new agreement with Google Book Search to increase the linkings between the two services.

Marcia Merryman-Means and I are back from New York, where we met with Paul Finkelman (executive editor of our Milestone Documents series) and with Regina Kahney, whose company (www.Marketorial.com) developed our corporate Web site and is now at work on www.MilestoneDocuments.com. We also had dinner (a terrific Indian restaurant on 22nd Street, I think) with a longtime freelance colleague, Carol Holmes, who has worked on many past and present Schlager Group projects.

I’ve recently enjoyed reading the fairly new “No Shelf Required” blog written by Sue Polanka, head of reference at Wright State University. The blog is a discussion of e-books and of course pays particular attention to reference e-book issues. A cool thing Sue is doing is interviewing publishing executives about their company’s e-book efforts. She already has a couple such podcasts posted on her blog; they are interviews with executives from Gale Cengage and Sage Publications.

Speaking of e-reference, the content from Milestone Documents in American History is now live on Salem History, Salem Press’s new digital platform. (A reminder that libraries that purchase the print get FREE access to the digital content on Salem History through 2011.) The interface is very user-friendly, and the site functions smoothly and well. The e-book version will also soon be available from a variety of e-book vendors. I’m thrilled that our content is immediately available in so many venues!

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.

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.