SchlagerBlog

Booklist continues to bring good news our way. Today comes word that the publication has starred its review of Milestone Documents of American Leaders, calling it “highly recommended for high school libraries” and an “excellent choice” for academic and public libraries as well. This review, like the interview with me for their “Bookmakers” feature, appears in the October 15 print issue; it’s available online here. For a roundup of what other reviewers have been saying about American Leaders, click here.

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).

It’s the start of review season for our most recent publication, Milestone Documents of American Leaders, as a bunch of appraisals in key publications will be appearing over the next 6 weeks. Leading off the coverage is a review in the October 1 issue of School Library Journal. (You can read the review online here; scroll down to “F” for Finkelman, Paul.) I am thrilled with this review because the writer highlights several critical aspects of the set:

• The primary documents covered range from the “personal and poignant” to the “public and political.”
•  ”Controversies … are recognized in an unbiased manner.”
• Our Questions for Further Study section (present in every entry) “will generate discussion in history classes”
• Purchase of the print set comes with free access to the same content online via Salem History
• Each entry includes a “helpful glossary and time line”
• Summing up: the work is “useful” and “informative” and a good companion to our award-winning first set, Milestone Documents in American History

Still to come in the next few weeks are reviews in Booklist, Choice, and Library Media Connection. I’ll be sure to share these reviews as they come in. In the meantime, librarians interested in purchasing Milestone Documents of American Leaders can do so by contacting Salem Press at 800-221-1592 or visiting their online site.

Check out our iPhone app: Presidential Speeches

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.

I’m happy to announce that librarians who subscribe to Choice Reviews Online can now see a free e-book preview of Milestone Documents of American Leaders. The entire text of all 4 volumes is on display. This gives librarians a great chance to see what the publication is like before they purchase it. In the near future, we hope to load a free preview of Milestone Documents in American History as well. Unfortunately, Choice Reviews Online is restricted to subscribers only.Of course, librarians should also realize that they can get free previews of our publications in a different way, via a trial of Salem History. This trial shows how the free online database works as opposed to how the print set looks/works. Remember that any library that purchases a set gets both the print and the online for the same price.

Yesterday on Twitter I posted the following:

Pondering how to get librarians interested in following a small reference publisher. How do we get the message out about our titles?

When I used the word “following,” I was referring not just to Twitter followers but also more broadly to librarians in general. As I explained in a follow-up tweet, a small publisher like us has a difficult challenge trying to get the word out about our titles. With no large advertising budget to provide visibility, the task is daunting indeed. The reference industry is dominated by a few giant companies; there are very few smaller, independent publishers even trying to compete.

Further complicating matters for us is that we don’t distribute our own titles. Rather, we hire Salem Press to take all orders and ship our books. Thus, when a librarian calls to order one of our titles, the voice on the other end of the phone says “Thank you for calling Salem Press.” When a shipment arrives, the box says “Salem Press.” In fact, many librarians probably think that the Milestone Documents series of books are from Salem, not Schlager. Even some reviewers of our titles have incorrectly listed the publisher as Salem.

To be sure, this distribution arrangement has its distinct advantages. We are able to utilize a sales force that has longstanding relationships with librarians all over the country. Our books show up in Salem Press catalogs and mailing pieces. And, crucially, we are able to participate in Salem’s unique print-electronic offer: buy the print, get the same content for free electronically through Salem History.

Nonetheless, the brand/identity challenge remains. How do we build an identity that sticks with librarians? How do we get them excited about our publications

In short, how do we go from being the runt of the litter to the pick of the litter?

One way, of course, is through social media. Twitter has been an amazing tool in this regard for us. A number of librarians now “follow” me, which allows me to engage them in “discussion” from time to time. This is one such instance; another occurred a few months ago, when I addressed the topic of how to get school librarians to be more active in promoting our books to their social science teachers. After all, they spend a lot of money to buy our titles, and those titles are designed not just with student research in mind but also with direct classroom tie-ins for teachers.

Another strategy that we’ve had some success with is giving away free posters. Last year, for instance, we offered free Constitution Day posters to any library that wanted them; more than 700 libraries called to request a poster. (Lesson learned: librarians love free stuff!)

It goes without saying that the foundation of any branding effort has to be quality products. You have to create superior, useful, relevant publications that help librarians serve their patrons. We certainly feel that we’ve done that, and the uniformly positive reviews and various awards and citations back us up. Nonetheless, building great products isn’t enough; you still have to get the word out to librarians. And on that front, all the Twittering and free posters in the world aren’t going to cut it, which is why we probably will begin to devote more resources to advertising in industry periodicals in the coming years. Still, I think these tools do show that creative efforts to reach customers can pay off for the small publisher.

If any librarians would like to chime in with suggestions about how to build our following, I would love to hear from you. I know that this is an incredibly stressful time for librarians everywhere; rarely a day goes by that I don’t see news of more branch closings, cut-backs, layoffs, and the like. As we continue to think about this issue, we will keep the recession in mind. I think it’s worth pointing out that one of the most creative and successful publisher responses to these dire times came from a small publisher: Alexander Street Press and its “50-State Giveaway” earlier this summer.

In the end, if all else fails, there is always the last refuge of the shameless promoter: puppies. The adorable canine pictured here is not just some generic pooch but rather the real-life Schlager Group Company Mascot. (OK, she is officially the pet of assistant editor Benjamin Painter.) Her name is Truffles, and she is a 3-month old pug. Genuine, irrepressible, a scene-stealer if ever there was one, and growing by the day. Hey, that’s not a bad model for Schlager Group to follow, is it?

Teachers everywhere are gearing up for the start of the new school year. Judging from the tweets I’m seeing from all the history teachers I follow on Twitter, technology is a big concern. What tools should we incorporate into the classroom? How do we engage students in Web-based research? How do we interact with other educators around the globe and learn from what they are doing? From Google Docs to Web-based syllabi to Twitter and Facebook, educators are spending significant time and energy on finding ways to transform the classroom experience for their students and for themselves. Of course, I recognize that teachers who use Twitter are by default likely to be the most interested in using technology to further classroom instruction (”tech ed”).  Still, it’s clear that these educators are the pioneers in a trend that is irreversible. The strategies that they develop in tech ed will eventually be adopted by virtually all teachers everwhere. Technology is only going to be more ubiquitous in our lives as time goes on, and–just as crucial–students will increasingly demand an educational experience that is infused with technological tools and possibilities.

Because we are in the midst of reimagining how we deliver our own content to teachers and students via the Web (I’m referring to the site redesign that is in progress for MilestoneDocuments.com, and the iPhone apps we are developing), I’ve been thinking a lot about this issue. And it seems that everywhere I turn these days, other people are thinking and writing about it as well. The article in this month’s Fast Company magazine about how “edupunks” are reinventing higher education through the use of online learning tools at very low cost has gotten a lot of attention in educational and technology circles. Likewise, history educators far and wide are blogging about how they are using technology (see The History Teacher’s Attic and Thinking in Mind for just 2 examples) in new and innovative ways. As often happens, a few select voices are making an outsized contribution. Witness Russell Tarr, a U.K. educator whose Active History site is innovating with gaming and other social Web tools and who has almost singlehandedly built an international networkof history educators via Twitter. (Just search on the #historyteacher hashtag in Twitter to see what I mean.)

Of course,  all the technological bells and whistles mean nothing if student achievement and learning aren’t also being transformed. As the educational consultant Peter Pappas pointed out in this blog post from last month:

“Learning must engage student in rigorous thinking at higher levels of Bloom - analyzing, evaluating and creating.”

Helping students with those very things–analyzing and evaluating primary sources as a way to better understand history–is our entire focus with our Milestone Documents series of reference books and MilestoneDocuments.com. And there is no doubt that in many classrooms around the country, students and educators are engaging with exactly this kind of higher-level learning process. However, far too many classrooms are nowhere near this ideal, either. Recently, managing editor Andrea Betts and I visited an inner-city Dallas high school recently and saw the hallway walls lined with simple posters that the students had created. There were posters about the Constitution, Brown v. Board of Education, and other major primary documents from U.S. history. “This is great to see,” we thought at first. But then Andrea asked the question: “Why are high school students spending their time making posters? Why aren’t they writing lengthy papers (or even short ones, but a lot of them), putting together sophisticated presentations, and the like?” We don’t know that some of this wasn’t happening, but my gut tells me that it wasn’t. I suspect that the “rigorous thinking at higher levels” that Peter Pappas referred to in his blog post was far from the minds of the teachers and administrators at this school. They were probably more focused on keeping kids in school (the dropout rate at the school was above 50%) and imparting some basic level of knowledge hoping that more kids might pass the state exams.

Which brings me back to the use of technology in the classroom. If ever the moment was ripe for a paradigm shift in educational instruction methods–at all levels of learning–it is now. The Internet, social media, and open source tools are indeed revolutionizing entire sectors of society and business (one example: publishing). How do we use them to reinvent history education in particular, and education in general? Is there a way to use them to close the achievement gap for the worst-performing schools and students? And where is the innovation going to come from–will it come from inside the public school system, from teachers, from charter schools, from new forums for online learning?

Certainly I don’t have the answers to these questions. But it’s a hopeful sign to see so many stakeholders thinking about these issues. Our kids deserve a better educational experience than they have been getting.

I bought an iPhone last week, and I have quickly become addicted to it. The interface is of course incredible, but the revolutionary part has gotta be the Apps store. It’s those apps that give the device its reach and power and that make it so useful. One app I haven’t yet downloaded, but intend to, is Stanza–which makes it easier to read e-books on the phone. Like most publishers, I’m giving serious thought to ways in which our content might work on all sorts of e-reading devices, including the iPhone–whether in e-book form or as individual apps. It’s a challenge on a number of fronts, not least of which is the technical one–a big hurdle for a small publisher like us. But regardless of the obstacles, I think these are exciting times to be a publisher. So many potential avenues to explore for new customers, new partners, new product paradigms, and even entirely new businesses.

Speaking of new media, we are about to embark on a major redesign of MilestoneDocuments.com, our Web site geared directly toward teachers and students needing information about primary source documents. The first version of the site was launched a little less than a year ago, and as I blogged about at the time, we viewed it entirely as an experiment. We wanted to see whether our encyclopedia content had any appeal on a by-the-article basis.  Although the results haven’t exactly been life-changing, we’ve had enough success to believe that the experiment should be expanded and continued. In the forthcoming version of the site, we’ll seek to make it a user-friendly destination for all sorts of information about primary documents, not merely a place to buy some good encyclopedia articles for a few bucks. We’ll be adding tons of new, free content (including information about famous documents in world history), and we’ll be integrating the separate Milestone Documents Blog content onto the main MilestoneDocuments.com home page. The result will be an entirely new approach to the topic for us, with continuous updates and stories about primary sources in the news, in the classroom, in our lives. (As we prepare for this new era, readers of the MD Blog will probably notice a slowdown in the number of posts.) The new site will also have a greatly expanded section for educators, who for obvious reasons are a crucial partner for us as we try to facilitate document-based learning in the classroom.

One of the great things about the past year has been seeing the extent to which history has been a part of the national dialogue. Much of this, of course, is due to the historic election of Barack Obama as president, but it has extended to all sorts of topics–comparisons between the Great Depression and our current, ongoing “Great Recession”; comparisons between the recent election controversy in Iran and the Iranian Revolution 30 years ago; etc. But whatever the cause, it has seemed that discussions about history have been everywhere. I think this is supremely healthy for our society, and one of our goals as a publisher is to help teachers and students navigate their way through such discussions. We’ll continue to do that through our print encyclopedias, which we spend so much energy and time producing. But we are also excited about finding other venues in which to do that. I’ll keep you posted on our various new media experiments in the months ahead.

I’m happy to report that reviews have started to appear for Milestone Documents of American Leaders, and so far the news is nothing but good. First comes an exciting piece by Doug Achterman over at Gale’s “Doug Reference Reviews” site, who calls the set an “excellent companion” to our first title, the award-winning Milestone Documents in American History, and says the series as a whole is “outstanding.” Also just out is a review from American Reference Books Annual (ARBA), which terms the set “useful” and “attractive.” OK, so it’s not as effusive as the ARBA review from 2008 about American History, but it’s welcome nonetheless. Alas, the ARBA review is behind a pay wall, so I can’t link to the full review. As other reviews appear, I’ll be sure to mention them here.

I’m happy to close the work week by linking to the product page that Salem Press has set up for our forthcoming 4-volume set Milestone Documents in World History. This page tells librarians and educators everything they need to know about the set when considering a purchase. But even casual readers will enjoy glancing through the model entry, Lin Zexu’s Letter to Queen Victoria of 1839. As the historian Q. Edward Wang of Rowan University points out in his detailed analysis, “The letter was, in effect, an ultimatum made by Commissioner Lin on behalf of the Qing emperor to the English monarch, delivering the unmistakable message that he and the Qing government were determined to ban the selling and smoking of opium once and for all and at any cost.”

Educators can see from the model that each entry in our set offers questions for further study to accompany the expert analysis and full text of the primary document. Not yet on display, but also in the print set, will be several classroom activity guides written by our consulting editor, the educator Cathleen Boivin. Do you use document-based learning in your classroom? If so, you’ll find the set to be extremely useful all across the world history curriculum.

Basic details: $395, 4 volumes, free online with purchase, ready November 2009.

Oh, and check out our beautiful new cover, courtesy of Patricia Moritz!