I am very ambivalent about this. By no means do I want to add a publish or perish component to my already lengthy responsibilities. But I do find that the limited voice of the practicing public librarian in professional literature to be a problem. While there are many exciting things happening in academia at this point, and the academic librarian’s experience is valuable, the academic and the public library are not the same. When it comes to specificity, our differences are heightened.

As a former academic and a teacher of research methods, I am aware of how academics can investigate the public library and contribute, but there is something lacking when we read research that is not steeped in the insider information of those with direct experience.  I would like to see more primary research and the experience of the public librarian more present.

I recognize time is a huge factor. Without the mandate, even those with the desire to publish can find writing pushed to the wayside as other tasks seem more pressing. For many locations, publication can be considered part of professional development.  It can also be considered community service and it certainly serves as a means to advertise your library. Perhaps if thought of in these ways, time might be more easily made for the task.

A larger problem that I have encountered is that many public librarians I have spoken with feel unworthy of the task. Because they manage small, rural libraries, because they do not have experience, because they lack a degree or because their job title is not administrative, some very talented and knowledgeable librarians think they have nothing to offer. This is simply untrue.

I am a published librarian. More than this, I am an editor and a peer reviewer for two library publications and I can share with you in no uncertain terms, you can do this. Write. Submit. There are many who can benefit from your experience. The public librarian voice needs and deserves to be heard.

What is the worst that can happen? You get an email or letter that says, ‘We’re sorry we can’t accept your work.’ This is far less stressful than dealing with the problem patron. As the Nike slogan goes, “Just do it!”

The post Share, Write, Publish first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Never before in the history of libraries has so much information been published every day online about libraries—their resources, services, facilities, and staff. This paradigm shift in how libraries communicate with their users and others has been the subject of much research in the professional literature of librarianship.

Several initiatives to develop, support, and enhance the library-as-publisher have emerged in the last few years. As digital information continues to transform libraries, it is useful to look back at the history of the library’s role as scholarly publisher. Understanding the history and significance of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, one of the exemplars of this role, is particularly illuminating. As libraries increasingly emphasize content and access to unique local collections, this publication serves as an illustrative encouragement and historical guidepost for the future of scholarly publishing by libraries.

The Bulletin of the New York Public Library (1897–1977) and its successors, the Bulletin of Research in the Humanities (1978–1987) and Biblion: Bulletin of the New York Public Library (1992–2001), represent a major publishing landmark in American scholarship.¹ This brief, informal review of the Bulletin includes its publication history, scope, and formats, as well as references to representative articles, underscoring its significant role in establishing libraries as active participants in the communication of scholarship.

The complete text of the Bulletin, Volumes 1–80 (1897–1977), is available at no charge online at the HathiTrust website. Its pages are from the University of Michigan Library’s hard copy back file, scanned by the Google Books project.

Robust Beginnings: Early Issues of the Bulletin

The Bulletin’s first article is an unsigned “Introductory Statement,” most likely written by either John Bigelow, the first President of the Board of Trustees of the New York Public Library, or John S. Billings, the then-retired first Director of the Library.² The “Introductory Statement” includes a detailed account of how the Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Libraries were consolidated to form the New York Public Library: “The terms of the agreement were as simple as possible. The new corporation was to establish and maintain a free public library and reading room in the City of New York, with such branches as might be deemed advisable.”³ The section on “Organization of the Library” lists five main departments: Executive, Catalogue, Shelf, Readers, and Periodical;⁴ remarkably, this pattern of organization is still in use by many libraries 120 years later.

Another item in the first issue is an “Address to the Mayor, Aldermen and Commonality of the City of New York” by John Bigelow. In reviewing the goals of the newly formed corporation to establish the New York Public Library, Bigelow included a table showing “the number of books in the principal Libraries of the World.” The list showed estimated holdings of twenty-eight libraries, ranked from highest number of volumes (Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris with 2,700,000) to lowest (New York Public Library with 350,000). Bigelow pointedly observed that “no one can fail to be impressed with the meagre and unsatisfactory provisions existing in the City of New York, either for scholars and students in the reference library, or for home read- ing through a library of circulation.”⁵

Bigelow’s speech to the NewYork politicians made a challenging comparison: “while millions have been spent upon Parks, Armories and Public Improvements, public contributions to libraries have been insignificant.”⁶ Bigelow concluded his peroration with this stirring call for public support: “When we consider the extent to which an institution of the character proposed [the New York Public Library] may fairly be expected to strengthen the police, diminish crime, raise public standard of morality, attract to our city men from every department of industry and every walk of life, add to the operative power of our people, and extend the influence of our Commonwealth, it can hardly be regarded otherwise than a privilege for the City to share in the work.”⁷

The third and final article in the first issue of the Bulletin was the “Report of the Director.” It included these sections: Catalogues, Classification and Shelf Location, Character of the Collections, Gifts, Purchases, Statistics of Volumes and Readers, and List of Principal Donors.⁸

In the second monthly issue of the Bulletin (February 1897), the precedent was set—and followed throughout the entire, distinguished publication history of this journal—to include primary source material of interest to scholars. This issue featured a formidable roster: “New York Oath Rolls of 1753–57,” in which the First Roll was termed “The Abjuration Oath.” Each of the undersigned “do sincerely promise and swear, that I will be faithful and bear true Allegiance to His Majesty King George the Second. So help me God.”⁹ The Second Roll was “The Declaration against Transubstantiation,” in which the undersigned declared that “there is not any Transubstantiation of the Elements of Bread and Wine, into the Body and Blood of Christ.”¹⁰

An early of example of resource sharing, at least bibliographically, may be found in another section of the second issue: “Periodicals Relating to Language and Philology in the New York Public Library and Columbia University Library.” An example of an entry in this list is “Philologus. Zeitschrift fűr das klassische Alterthum,” with detailed cataloging notes.¹¹ A tradition established early on for the Bulletin was listings of “Principal Book Gifts.” These entries were also detailed: “Ptolemy (Claudius). Tabvlae Geographicae ad mentem auto- ris restitutae & emendate per Gerardum Mercatorem. Coloniae Agrippinae, 1578. Gift of Mr. Maitland and Mr. Avery.”¹² The fifth issue of the Bulletin (May 1897) included a bibliography titled “Documents Relative to the Higher Education of Women,”¹³ as well as a continuing series of descriptive bibliographies of primary source documents on the Continental Congress of 1774, which had been donated to the Library by Trustee John S. Kennedy.¹⁴

Commitment to Scholarship

Even a brief sampling of scholarly articles and notes on primary resources and unpublished manuscript documents in the Bulletin underscores the scope and significance of the journal’s continued support for and encouragement of a wide spectrum of academic interests:

• Letters of Benjamin Franklin on Public A airs, 1773–1787¹⁵
• The Heritage of the Modern Printer¹⁶
• The Library’s First Folio Shakespeares¹⁷
• History of Aeronautics¹⁸
• Political Cartoons as Historical Documents¹⁹
• Working Together: Publisher, Bookseller, and Librarian²⁰
• Stephen Crane: Some New Stories²¹
• Reminiscences of Willa Cather as a Teacher²²
• The Influence of Thoreau’s Lecturing upon his Writing²³
• Training of Children’s Librarians: History and Implications²⁴
• The Importance of Publishing “Earnest”²⁵
• DeQuincey’s First Article in Black- wood’s Magazine²⁶
• The Craftsmanship of Lowell: Revisions in The Cathedral²⁷
• The New England Character in Cooper’s Social Novels²⁸
• The “Conservatism” of Robert Frost²⁹

An excellent summary of the purpose, scope, and importance of the scholarly materials published in the Bulletin is found in the introduction to a forty-year index to the journal, covering 1897–1936. The Bulletin has also contained selections from our manuscripts printed in full or in such extracts as would best show our resources in unprinted sources
for historical investigation, and the detailed lists of such manuscript collections as our Washington papers, the Andrew Jackson papers, and similar collections. Practically every number has contained a list of our books on some topic of interest, covering such different fields as literary annuals, general geographical atlases, bimetallism, bridges, Cervantes literature, constitutions and political rights, electricity, fish and fisheries, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ireland, marriage and divorce, naval history, prices and wages, the Shakers, woman, etc.³⁰

The last volume of the Bulletin published under that title was Volume 80, 1976–77. The number of scholarly articles in that volume is impressive, and nearly all of them are based on manuscript and archival collections in the Library. Some examples are:

• John Milton and the Performing Arts³¹
• Carlyle and the Jacobin Undercurrent in German Transcendentalism³²
• Virginia Woolf, the Pargeter: A Reading of The Years³³
• The Loudspeaker and the Human Voice: Politics and the Form of The Years³⁴
• Lord Chester eld, Barnaby Rudge, and the History of Conscience³⁵

A New Publisher, a New Name: The Bulletin of Research in the Humanities

In the last issue of the Bulletin, this announcement was featured:

As we go to press: New Support for This Bulletin—and a New Name! Our next issues will appear early next year under a new publishing arrangement—and with a new title. The Spring 1978 issue of the quarterly Bulletin of Research in the Humanities (formerly Bulletin of the New York Public Library) will have the same broad coverage of scholarship in the humanities, including the graphic and performing arts, with the same illustrated format and prize-winning typography….William F. Boni, President of Readex Books (a Division of Readex Microprint Corporation), whose generous support has made possible the publication of the Bulletin since 1973, has offered to take on the responsibility of sole publisher; an international Advisory Board of scholars in numerous fields has been formed; and staff members of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, have come to the assistance of the editorial staff of the Library in the exacting work of evaluating and editing the various articles submitted for publication.³⁶

Library President Richard Couper stated, “We welcome the arrangement for a continuation of this ne academic journal of eighty years’ history and the expansion of services to the international academic community.”³⁷ In the announcement of the new arrangement and the forthcoming publication of Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, another excellent summary of the history and scope of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library was provided:

“Founded in 1897, the Bulletin consisted for some years of institutional news, edited texts of documents, and bibliographies of extensive Library holdings. By mid-century it had evolved into a learned journal in the humanities. Its contents have often drawn upon the special resources of the Library, such as its noted collections on American history and on black, Jewish, and Slavonic history and culture, the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, and the extensive holdings in illuminated manuscripts, illustrated books, and prints. Since the opening of the performing arts complex of The NewYork Public Library at Lincoln Center, the Bulletin has increased its presentation of illustrated essays on music, theatre, and dance. The new Bulletin of Research in the Humanities (abbreviation BRH), while continuing these emphases, will also draw upon research performed at the special humanities research facilities at Stony Brook Library, such as the recently opened Archives of Irish Literature and a new developing project applying scientific technology to the study of cultural documents. Publishable results of research done anywhere will be welcomed, but especially articles exemplary in method.³⁸

It was also announced that David Erdman, a leading William Blake scholar, would continue as editor of the publication. A new Advisory Board was established, and included scholars from Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale Universities.³⁹

Of particular significance in the announcement about the continuation of the Bulletin was the reference to William Boni’s previous and continuing financial support for the journal. His company, Readex Books, became the sole publisher. The storied form of Boni and Liveright was established by Horace Liveright and William’s father, Albert Boni, in 1917, with the initial publication of the “Modern Library of the World’s Best Classics.” This series later became the forerunner of the Random House “Modern Library.” Albert Boni’s obituary in the New York Times noted that as “one of the historic and flamboyant figures in American publish- ing . . . in the post-World War I period [he] brought out the work of Thornton Wilder, Ford Madox Ford, Theodore Dreiser and Leon Trotsky, and . . . was one of the pioneers in the paperback and book-club field.”⁴⁰

The Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, despite its quite scholarly scope, reserved a certain restrained but playful flamboyance for itself. A 1982 advertisement for the Bulletin in the Shakespeare Quarterly noted that the journal “appeals to the Generalist, the Literary Specialist, the Art Lover, the Book Lover, the Feminist, [and] the Bibliographer.” Subscribers could expect to “discover the undiscovered [and] anticipate the unanticipated.”⁴¹

In the same advertisement, a table of contents for the forthcoming issue was included, with the statement that the journal features “readable scholarly articles in a handsomely illustrated format.”

• Romanticism: A special issue on Blake, Yeats, and the Starry Heavens
• Medieval Studies: 9th-Century Harkness Gospels
• Fine Arts & Black Studies: Art Collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture
• American Literature and Textual Studies: The Endings of Walden
• The Nineties & Beyond: Poet and Priest John Gray and His Circle
• Modern Literature: Virginia Woolf and the Elizabethans; Jack Kerouac’s Notebooks.⁴²

Biblion Refocuses on the Library

Following a five-year hiatus, the next publication—a worthy successor to Bulletin of Research in the Humanities and Bulletin of the New York Public Library—was Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library, published semiannually. This journal had an auspicious beginning with its first issue in 1992. Statements by Library President Timothy Healy and Biblion’s editor Anne Skillion provide real insight into the history and goals of the publication. “The Library,” declared Healy, “is keeper of more than one kind of treasure. … By providing a forum for scholars in and out of the Library, Biblion can raise awareness about the services we offer, o er new insights into our collections, and contribute to the historical record.”⁴³

More specifically, Skillion brie y reviews the history of the publication and the Library and lays out the “new” focus for Biblion. “With Biblion, we return to the idea of a publication focused entirely on the Library—its collections, services, history, and staff—insofar as these bear some interest to other libraries, scholars, researchers in fields supported by our collections, bibliophiles, library historians, and educators.”⁴⁴

A new, elegant design and typeface, quality paperback binding, and illustrations which included photographs and reproductions of manuscript sources established Biblion as a first-rate scholarly journal. The cover of the first issue featured a candid photograph of celebrated author Vladimir Nabokov, with an inscription in his own hand: “The author, in Cambridge, Spring 1920. It was not unnatural for a Russian, when gradually discovering the pleasures of the Cam [River], to prefer at first a rowboat to the more proper canoe or punt.”⁴⁵

This issue of the journal announced the new Vladimir Nabokov Archive in the Berg Collection in the Library. The issue carried statements by the author’s son, Dimitri, and Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd, who had worked for many years with Véra Nabokov, the novelist’s widow, to assemble and inventory the Archive and arrange for its move from Montreux, Switzerland.⁴⁶

Biblion celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Library in the Spring and Fall 1995 issues, jointly titled “The New York Public Library: Celebrating Its Second Century.”⁴⁷ The covers of the commemorative issues include a striking graphic, featuring the word library in a spectrum of orthographic styles.

The double-entendre of the journal’s portmanteau title, bib and lion, is not evidently noted in the various issues of the journal. A lexical note in the first issue of the publication does, however, refer to the Greek word biblion, a “strip of papyrus. . .in the Middle Ages, it was the word applied to collections of fragments of ancient texts.”⁴⁸

A special issue of Biblion for Volume 5, Spring 1997, showcases a symposium on “Global Library Strategies for the 21st Century: Summit of World Library Leaders,” with a keynote speech by Library Director Paul LeClerc. The summit was held in April 1996 and featured sessions on “Leadership Roles for Libraries in a Globally Connected Society,” “New Societal Roles for the Library,” and “Funding the Global Library.” Participants from twenty-seven countries attended the summit.⁴⁹

Biblion, not unlike the New Yorker, organized its tables of contents by certain rubrics. Examples are: The History of Reading, Special Collections, Dance Archives, Annals, Oral History, New York City History, The Visual Record, Pioneers, Historical Encounters, The Written Record, Musical Archives, History of the Library, Biographer in the Stacks, and Library History.

A sampling of articles from the journal demonstrates the scope, variety, and scholarly content of the articles, as well as a kind of arch, even occasionally playful, editorial approach:

• Translations of the Book of Common Prayer in The Research Libraries⁵⁰
• Mythology of Empire: Imperial Russian Coronation Albums⁵¹
• I Could Do It While Shaving: Opening of the H.M. Lydenberg Records on the Librarian of Congress Nominations, 1939–45⁵²
• The Literature of Food and Drink⁵³
• From Gutenberg to William Gibson: Revolutions in Knowledge from the Renaissance into the 21st Century⁵⁴
• A Note on Syphilis as Americana⁵⁵
• The Library’s Map Division Goes to War, 1941–45⁵⁶
• The Electronic Librarian Is a Verb/The Electronic Library Is Not a Sentence⁵⁷
• The Future of Primary Records58 • Virtual Lit: A Discussion⁵⁹
• Artists under Oath: Biographers, Librarians, and the Biographical Enterprise⁶⁰
• Transatlantic Crossings: Publishing American Literature in Britain and British Literature in the United States⁶¹

The significance and impact of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library, and its successor journals, Bulletin of Research in the Humanities and Biblion, can be partly assessed by a bibliometric summary. According to UlrichsWeb database, these publications are indexed in twenty-eight databases. Two of the databases listed are the Russian Academy of Sciences Bibliographies and the Library Literature and Information Science Retrospective, 1905–1983.⁶² The number of citations to the Bulletin in the Library and Information Science Abstracts database is 122 (1970–1977). In the Modern Language Association’s International Bibliography, there are 687 citations to the Bulletin (1926–1977), 123 citations to the Bulletin of Research in the Humanities, and 57 citations to Biblion.⁶³ In-depth citation analysis would be instructive.

Bringing Scholarly Publication into the Twenty-First Century

Biblion ceased publication in 2001. In an intriguing irony, masterfully described in an online post for The Atlantic by contributing editor Alexis Madrigal, the New York Public Library’s mobile application, named “Biblion,” was launched ten years later. Madrigal poses the question: “Did the New York Public Library Just Build the Magazine App of the Future?” According to Madrigal, “the first edition of Biblion focuses on the 1939–40 World Fair. And what’s fascinating to me is that you don’t feel like you’re reading something about the fair, but experiencing what it’s like to tool around behind the scenes at a museum or in an archive. The impression is spatial. You chart you own path, find pieces of text, photos or videos, and then assemble them yourself into a narrative of the fair.”⁶⁴

With Biblion, scholars, library users, and indeed anyone connected to the Internet can begin to navigate the resources of the Library. The horizons for learning, engagement in diverse cultures, historical eras, arts, and sciences, as well as new scholarship, are widening again, a future which the first editors of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library could scarcely have imagined.

What are the implications for the development of digital libraries and their relationship to scholarly library publishing and unique local and archival collections? In the last few years, several developments have underscored how libraries are re-inventing themselves as publishers.⁶⁵ The path-breaking work of journals like the Bulletin and its successors, as well as continuing publications and organizations such as Huntington Library Quarterly, Huntington Library Press, and the Harvard Library Bulletin, can inform and encourage the next chapter to be written in the history of the library as scholarly publisher.

References

1. https://ulrichsweb.serialssolutions.com
2. “Introductory Statement,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library (hereinafter Bulletin) 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1897): 12.
3. Ibid., 11.
4. Ibid., 13.
5. John Bigelow, “Address to the Mayor, Aldermen and Commonality of the City of New York,” Bulletin 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1897): 23.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 27.
8. Bigelow, “Report of the Director,” Bulletin 1, no. 1 (Jan. 1897): 28–40.
9. “New York Oath Rolls of 1753–57,” Bulletin 1, no. 2 (Feb. 1897): 44.
10. 10. Ibid., 46. 37.
11. “Periodicals Relating to Language and 38. Philology in the New York Public Library 39. and Columbia University Library,” 40. Bulletin 1, no. 2 (Feb. 1897): 54.
12. “Principal Book Gifts of 1895 and 1896,” Bulletin 1, no. 2 (Feb. 1897): 57.
13. “Documents Relative to the Higher 41. Education of Women,” Bulletin 1, no. 5 (May 1897): 137. 42.
14. “The Continental Congress of 1774,” 43. Bulletin 1, no. 5 (May 1897): 125.
15. Bulletin 10, no. 1 (Jan. 1906): 13.
16. Margaret Bingham Stillwell, Bulletin 20, no. 10 (Oct. 1916): 737. 44.
17. Bulletin 25, no. 12 (Dec. 1921): 799.
18. William B. Gamble, Bulletin 40, no. 1 45. (Jan. 1936): 27. 46.
19. Frank Weitenkampf, Bulletin 50, no. 3 47. (Mar. 1946): 171.
20. Frederic G. Melcher, Bulletin 60, no. 48. 11–12 (Nov.–Dec. 1956): 619. 49.
21. R.W. Stallman, ed., Bulletin 60, no. 9 50. (Sept. 1956): 455. 51.
22. Phyllis Martin Hutchinson, Bulletin 60, no. 6 (June 1956): 263. 52.
23. Walter Harding, Bulletin 60, no. 2 (Feb. 53. 1956): 74. 54.
24. Elizabeth Nesbitt, Bulletin 60, no. 11–12 55. (Nov.–Dec. 1956): 605. 56.
25. David V. Erdman, Bulletin 60, no. 8 (Aug. 57. 1956): 368.
26. Richard H. Byrns, Bulletin 60, no. 7 (July 1956): 333.
27. G. Thomas Tanselle, Bulletin 70, no. 1 60. (Jan. 1966): 50.
28. James W. Tuttleton, Bulletin 70, no. 5 (May 1966): 305.
29. Harsharan Singh Ahluwalia, Bulletin 70, no. 8 (Oct. 1966): 485.
30. Deoch Fulton, in Daniel C. Haskel, ed, Bulletin of the New York Public Library: Index to Volumes 1–40, 1897–1936 (New York: New York Public Library, 1937), v.
31. Martha Winburn England, Bulletin 80, no. 1 (Autumn 1976): 19.
32. Dennis Douglas, Bulletin 80, no. 1 (Autumn 1976): 105.
33. Mitchell A. Leaska, Bulletin 80, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 172.
34. Margaret Comstock, Bulletin 80, no. 2 (Winter 1977): 252.
35. Myron Magnet, Bulletin 80, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 474.
36. “New Support for This Bulletin—and a New Name!,” Bulletin 80, no. 4 (Summer 1977): 449.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., 449–50.
39. Ibid., 450.
40. Herbert. Mitgang, “Albert Boni, Publisher, Dies, Founder of Boni & Liveright,” New York Times, Aug. 1, 1988, 14.
41. Shakespeare Quarterly 33, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 128.
42. Ibid.
43. Timothy Healy, “Introductions to the Library,” Biblion: The Bulletin of the New York Public Library 1, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 3–4.
44. Anne Skillion, “An Introduction to Biblion,” Biblion 1, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 4.
45. Biblion 1, no. 1 (Fall 1992): cover.
46. Ibid., 7–36.
47. Biblion 3, no. 2 (Spring 1995); Biblion 4, no. 1 (Fall 1995).
48. Biblion 1, no. 1 (Fall 1992), n.p.
49. Biblion 5, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 2.
50. Biblion 1, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 48
51. Ibid., 77.
52. Biblion 1, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 10.
53. Biblion 2, no. 1 (Fall 1993): 19.
54. Biblion 3, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 5.
55. Ibid., 140.
56. Biblion 3, no. 2 (Spring 1995): 126.
57. Biblion 4, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 139

The post The Library as Scholarly Publisher An Informal History of the Bulletin of the New York Public Library first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Promotion of the event usually starts in August/September in most libraries, so now is the time when libraries are hosting prep events and finalizing plans to be Come Write In (CWI) spaces. Last year, NaNoWriMo had almost 400,000 participants and close to 1,200 participating libraries and bookstores.[i]

NaNoWriMo is not just for adults. NaNoWriMo’s Young Writers Program[ii] is like the main program, but specifically geared for teen/young students. Young writers have the flexibility to set their own word quota and do not have to adhere to the daunting 50,000 words in one month goal. Young Writers are given motivation to keep their quotas by earning badges for accomplishing certain writing goals. Another cool feature for young writers is the Dare Machine, which populates story ideas/twists to encourage creativity and challenges into the writing process.

While others only host activities until the end of November, some libraries host events into spring with workshops on editing and publishing. But it doesn’t have to end there. NaNoWriMo has an option for those wanting to keep the writing love all year round. Camp NaNoWriMo hosts writing sessions in April and July. What makes these sessions special is that you set your own writing quota and join a “cabin” with nineteen other writers. Your cabinmates can share encouragement, pointers, and act as a sounding board for ideas that you are unsure of. It’s like actual camp, but online and with novelists. You can use this time of collaboration to write something new or edit a current work. If you meet your writing goals during Camp NaNoWriMo, you are eligible to win prizes.

NaNoWriMo, the Young Writers Program, and Camp NaNoWriMo serve as tools in a librarian’s kit of programming and learning for people of all ages and abilities. We need to use what is available to us, especially when the resource is free and programming costs are low. If your library is not participating next month, that does not mean that you cannot start planning for an April Camp NaNoWriMo event. Everyone has a story to tell, but some may find expressing themselves to be challenging, or need help finding inspiration. Being around other writers and being held accountable are great ways to overcome these obstacles.

References

[i] https://nanowrimo.org/press

[ii] https://ywp.nanowrimo.org/pages/for-writers

The post National Novel Writing Month Is Not Just for November first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Traditionally, libraries have self-published “…bibliographies, facsimiles, and catalogs…”[2] However, it is only recently that public libraries have begun to extend self-publishing workshops, software, and resources for patrons, specifically targeting community involvement in the publishing process. I believe the makerspace movement has really helped open the door by bringing awareness to the library’s mission to service patrons through a variety of means, not just information acquisition, curation, and distribution. Modern libraries are helping patrons create and produce original works (i.e. makerspaces). One of those things should be books.

In the book/library world, self-published books carry a stigma; that they are not as good as traditionally published books as far as content, editing, design, and etc.  But that does not mean we cannot have a self-published book section in our libraries?  A self-published book section that is clearly defined and labeled as such, including its own acquisition policy. Who said the library must purchase them, anyway? Petition indie authors in the community for donated copies of their work. Have an indie author open house, where in exchange for a book donation, they can take part in an author Q&A session. This will not only draw people into the library, but will provide the library with new material and help dispel myths about self-publishing.

As librarians, we must ask ourselves: who do we serve? We serve the people of our communities, and it should be our mission to allow the community to express themselves through our resources. For example, take makerspaces. These areas usually include 3D printers, laser cutters/engravers, vinyl cutters, media conversion labs, sewing machines, etc. These items are there for patrons to produce. Why not encourage patrons to produce books? We can do this by teaching patrons how to use software and online resources to produce quality material. There are many places where patrons can self-publish their books for free. Lulu.com and Amazon CreateSpace are two such places. Yes, they have the option to pay for design assistance, but the entire process can be free if they choose to do so. Print books and eBooks can be made this way. Or, if your library is big enough, a print on demand (POD) book machine might be something to consider. The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County (OH) has done just that by making available a POD Espresso Book Machine.

Ideas to bring self-publishing to your library:

• Combine NaNoWriMo programming with concurrent or post-event self-publishing workshops.
• Create a locally self-published author book display and shelving area.
• Invite local indie authors to speak about their projects and the steps they took to self-publish.
• Demonstrate how to use appropriate software to create content.
• Hold workshops that compare traditional and self-publishing, with tips for succeeding with each.

References

[1] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0020.106?view=text;rgn=main

[2] Ibid.

The post Self-Publishing, Indie Authors, and Libraries first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Some libraries have automatic approval orders. Those are the kind of orders in which the publishers, jobbers, or distributors send everything, and someone at the library decides whether or not an item is kept or sent back to the publisher or distributor. Many of these returned books end up at bookstores and elsewhere as ‘remainders’ at a very low price.

Recent information from the book world tells us it is currently likely that only 250 copies of a given nonfiction title will ever be sold, and only a 1 percent chance it will show up at a bookstore. Yet, with around 119,500 libraries throughout the U.S., if libraries are really in the business of preserving and giving access to what has been written, it seems strange there wouldn’t be more sales. With 725,000 self-published books available each year, and around 300,000 books published by the big 5 houses, it becomes a gargantuan task. Should libraries try?

Contemporary composers’ alliances and groups are now trying to organize and preserve new music, scores, and recordings of productions. Some collectors are still trying to collect all of the output of some artists’ works and recordings. One has to wonder what the library world is doing to preserve the printed published word. Yes, libraries do have options and opportunities to preserve some things, manage what’s best for their particular audience or customers, and within constraints of budgets, get to preserve some things. And yes there are digitization preservation programs going on to format such printed material in order to have space for it all.

We don’t know what happens to all those returned remainders when no one buys them. Although I know bookstores dump the returns in the dumpsters (after tearing off the covers for returning and getting credit) when they might have been preserved elsewhere. At one point a prison library was able to get a bookstore to donate its unreturnable books, with the library realizing full retail price tax deductions. While the prison was not in the business of preservation, it did in a way, keep the books available if only through Interlibrary Loan. One inmate at the prison wrote to the Detroit Public Library seeking a book, thinking it wouldn’t be in his small prison library; DPL did not have it, the prison library did.

Libraries are doing what they can, but discoverability is becoming increasingly difficult with OP books and OBP (out of business publishers) and M&A (mergers and acquisitions publishers). At a forum of the 66th Frankfurt Book Fair, deputy editor of The Bookseller’s Futurebook, summed it up nicely when he said: “It’s a great thing that everybody can publish a book today, and it’s a bad thing that everybody can publish a book today.”

Mostly, it falls to our national libraries such as the Library of Congress to collect all the books. This works if everyone registers for copyright, as a book or books are to be placed in the LC as part of the copyright process. This kind of preservation won’t work any longer now with eBooks and the cost of changing an address for single book authors. It will be up to consortia to figure out who collects what. Some years ago, the libraries of Wales, United Kingdom had developed a cooperative program to collect all recordings from all labels produced in the country. Different libraries would collect everything in a specified genre, then share (interlibrary loans) when the need required. There are some consortia for cooperative collection development such as ALA’s Transforming Libraries goal and objectives strategic plan of 2010 and the book “Shared Collections: Collaborative Stewardship”. Each group has some documentation of progress in their respective groups, but will there be a central organization to tell us who has what?

We have had Gap Analysis projects for training, diversity, and electronic resources, but in my very short bit of research, I see no Gap Analysis project which tells us what books,genres, and resources libraries don’t have. R. R. Bowker, The Library of Congress, OCLC, Hathi-Trust, WorldCat, and FirstSearch databases are helping, but finding a library with the work one wants and actually has available, is pretty daunting. Will we find a way, both of discovery and retrieval, and for preserving contemporary works? We may need very large initiatives of state-wide and national projects to even come close.

There are of course arguments for and against preserving all information in any of the formats. Is leaving it to the collectors a good plan?

The post Book? Book? Do You Know Where This Book Is? first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Le Guin, honored for her distinguished contribution to American letters, spoke stridently in defense of science fiction and of all writers and publishers, “I rejoice in accepting [this prize] for, and sharing it with, all the writers who were excluded from literature for so long: my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction. Later in the speech, Le Guin’s remarks became more pointed, stating, “Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial. I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.”

The profiteer in question was Amazon who, during its seven month battle over pricing with Hachette Book Group Publishers, took steps that were heavily criticized by some authors, including removing preorder buttons on Hachette titles and reputedly delaying shipment of some books. The preorders are often used as a marker for bestseller lists and orders for bookstores. By eliminating these options, Amazon was indirectly affecting the sales and promotion of these titles as well as future sales from this publisher and these authors associated with Hachette Book Group.

Some of the other highlights of the night’s awards were former Marine Phil Klay taking home top prize for fiction for Redeployment, his debut story collection, while Louise Gluck won the poetry prize for Faithful and Virtuous Night. Other awards were given to nonfiction writer Evan Osnos for Age of Ambition and young adult literature author Jacqueline Woodson for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming.

The night however, belonged to Le Guin. Amazon was in attendance at the awards ceremony but declined to comment on her speech. Nevertheless, many others cheered and applauded with admiration for her.

Cover Photo Credit: Ellen Forsyth (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The post Ursula LeGuin Stirs Things Up at National Book Awards first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Trends in Publishing

Two key trends have emerged that will drive the future not only of publishing, but of public librarianship. They are:

1. The rise of e-books. By the end of 2010, Amazon reported that it had sold 115 e-books for each 100 paperbacks, and 3 e-books for each hardback.¹ On October 19, 2011, author Erik Larson told me at a local book talk that his most recent book, In the Garden of Beasts, had sold 500,000 copies––and that fully half of them had been e-book sales. While probably fewer than 20 percent of Americans own an e-book reader (Pew reported a 12 percent number in May 2011, and that number had doubled since November 20102), they read a lot, and every holiday boosts their number. Beyond the steady growth of this market, there is also a compelling economic force: Even best-selling authors typically make only about 10 percent on each sale of a print book. But with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and a host of new e-only publishers such as Smashwords and BookBrewer, authors are getting 70 to 90 percent of the sale. (And there is some anecdotal evidence that commercial authors are now getting a higher royalty on sales from e-books than from paper.) E-publishing is attractive not only to established authors (who already have an audience), but new authors with dreams of making a fortune, beholden to no one. Finally, there are also authors who are adopting the Creative Commons license, for whom e-publishing is simply a low cost way to get their message into the world.
2. The rise of self-publishing. In 2004, there were 29,000 self-published titles in the United States. By 2009, that had grown to 766,000––roughly two-and-a-half times the output of commercial publishing. By the end of 2010, there were more than 2.7 million titles.3 Such phenomenal growth presents profound challenges to librarians: How can we stay on top of such a flood of new content? How can we determine what’s good? How can we manage the acquisition and cataloging of even the best? It is the job of the public library to gather, organize, and present to the public the intellectual content of our culture. Yet few public libraries collect any self-published works at all––typically, only the most persistent of local authors, and then, probably on topics of local history. The truth is we really don’t know what’s out there. Wouldn’t now be a good time to start finding out?

The Problems of Outsourcing

Certainly, librarians have heralded the coming of the e-book for a long time. But it wasn’t until the arrival of the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad that the demand really took off. When patrons showed up after last Christmas asking for e-books, there was really only one public library solution: OverDrive.

The good news is that OverDrive gave us a solution when we needed one. It was very much like the model we had followed with periodical databases: We outsourced the content aggregation, indexing, and presentation to a vendor. That made it familiar. But that outsourcing has brought along some troubles, too. I see four of them:

1. Loss of ownership. My library’s current OverDrive contract specifies that if we leave OverDrive, we also leave all of the content we have licensed.
2. Increased costs. While I have not done a title-by-title comparison across the board, I have concluded two things. First, most OverDrive licenses exceed what a consumer would pay for the same title if available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Second, while sometimes e-book prices are lower than the comparable print version, suddenly we have lost a mainstay of library budgets: the discount. My library’s collection budget currently exceeds $3.5 million annually. For that, we negotiate buying discounts up to 45 percent. OverDrive also charges an annual platform fee. Moreover, as with the state of Kansas, OverDrive has shown itself willing to unilaterally demand price increases of up to 700 percent over a four year period.⁴ Then, of course, there’s the HarperCollins notion of charging an additional license fee for materials circulating more than twenty-six times. At this moment in history, e-books, despite the fact that they are cheaper to produce, are relatively far more expensive to “buy.”
3. Confusing user interface. Again like the multiplicity of database vendors, the OverDrive model of e-book provision splinters the user experience. We might have MARC records for OverDrive titles, but the instant patrons selects one, suddenly they are yanked out of our catalog and dropped into a system that looks, feels, and operates very differently. This fragmentation of the user experience makes library use unpredictable, cumbersome, and difficult.
4. No used e-books. This is a twist on the “loss of ownership” issue. The secondary market of print––whether withdrawn from or donated to a library––is huge. Libraries recycle books into communities in many ways: nonprofit organizations, thrift stores, churches, charter schools, overseas charity efforts, overseas troops, and not least, poorer families and students, who pick up books at pennies on the dollar. There are no used e-books. That means fewer books in homes, fewer people getting into the habit of buying books, fewer people discovering authors.

Disruptive Technology

Sometimes print is profoundly disruptive. The first time was the invention of moveable type. The surge of print––mostly of Bibles––directly resulted in a profound challenge to the most powerful institution of the time, the Catholic Church. When people could read the Bible for themselves, they formed their own opinions, sometimes different from those of the parish priest. The rise of literacy is directly related to the secular fall of the church.

A second example is the age of the broadside. At the end of the Colonial period there was an explosion of political writings. People––like Benjamin Franklin––went to the local newspaper printer to print up often anonymous screeds of 8, 16, 32, or 64 pages. That’s where Thomas Paine got his start, and many others. The broadside––the blogs of the day––launched a revolution.

The third example may well be the self-published e-book. It’s fair to wonder which institutional power or powers will fall this time.

There are now at least seven links in the public library chain of distribution from author to reader: author, agent, publisher (which includes acquisition, editing, copyediting, book design, cover design, printing, and marketing), reviewer, distributor, library, and reader. I don’t see how we can do without the first and last of those. But for everyone in between, we had better be able to show that we can add value at a reasonable cost, or the reader will simply step around us. If reviewers can’t keep up with 2.7 million new titles, we’ll need new strategies (see “crowdsourcing collection development” below). If distributors require us to buy materials in proprietary formats (Amazon’s mobi and Baker and Taylor’s Blio), then we will contact publishers directly. If publishers won’t sell to us at all, then we’ll talk to agents. If agents won’t talk to us, we’ll talk to authors––many of whom grew up in libraries and want their works in our institutions. And let’s not forget that most of those 2.7 million titles are from authors who are unattached. To them, the library might become the publisher and the bookseller. But I’ll say more about that below.

My point here is that public libraries don’t have to sit back passively as publishers and distributors unilaterally redefine the terms of our relationship. These commercial entities now comprise less than 12 percent of the market of new content. While not all of that nontraditional content is “good,” some of it may be wonderful. In a time of disruption, do we put our time and money into maintaining the old, or do we leverage our skills and talents into something new, but more vibrant and alive?

Managing Our Own Content

What drives a lot of publishers right now is fear. They saw what happened to the music industry. One file gets out on a peer-to-peer network, and sales disappear. Putting that book file on a secure third-party server (OverDrive, 3M, or other) and licensing its access looked like a way to lock it down. Indeed, licensing looked more profitable than selling. Surely they could make more money charging per view or per year than allowing many readers for one purchase.

Publishers are also extremely wary of Amazon, which has decimated many bookstores, the traditional consumer outlet for publishers. Amazon is driving down the margin of profit, particularly for used books.

It’s also the case that many publishers don’t really understand the value of the library market. Some think we steal sales from them. The truth? We account for about 10 percent of publisher sales⁵ and 40 percent of children’s.⁶ Public libraries account for about $1.8 billion of sales a year. Other studies show that libraries directly promote the publisher’s bottom line.⁷ “Our data show that over 50 percent of all library users report purchasing books by an author they were introduced to in the library,” said Library Journal executive editor Rebecca Miller.⁸

When librarians thought of an e-book on their catalogs, they saw the possibility of instant gratification. An electronic file doesn’t have the limitations of physical items. They imagined being able to satisfy every single demand for a new book simultaneously. We could replace the market of scarcity with a market of abundance.

But that won’t work. Publishers can’t stay in business if they sell one copy to institutions that used to buy hundreds. And authors can’t make a living––without whom we have no content at all.

I was myself content to think that some new licensing model might be in order until I spoke with a friend and colleague, Joseph Sanchez, then the director of the Red Rocks Community College, and now associated with the University of Colorado Denver. “If we maintain the existing model ––one user at a time––then what does a publisher have to be afraid of?”⁹ It’s true that the file doesn’t “wear out.” But most library materials aren’t discarded because of condition; they’re discarded because they are no longer in demand. Our patrons mostly want what’s new.

The more I thought about that, the more brilliant I found it. This is a case where the existing model––libraries buying at discount, managing the content ourselves, “checking it out” to one patron at a time, buying multiple copies to meet demonstrated demand––translates very well into the e-publishing world.
So I asked Monique Sendze, my associate director of information technology, to investigate a method of circulating digital rights management (DRM)-protected content. Her article, “The E-Book Experiment,” details the infrastructure she has now built (see page 34).

In brief, that e-content management system includes the following components and features:

• A Vufind (open source) discovery front end. Vufind integrates searching, displaying, recommending, ranking, reviewing, and delivering the content to a private cloud. There is one user experience, for print or digital content.
• An HTML5-based online e-reader for all e-book content (and another “browser” for audio content). This software remembers where you are in a book, allowing you to read it across multiple browser-enabled devices. All you need to do is log into your account.
• Free content (Project Gutenberg, public domain, Creative Commons) sits on a MYSQL server. It can be downloaded freely. But it too is in the catalog.
• DRM-protected content lives on an Adobe Content Server (ACS). This industry standard solution is used and understood by many publishers. It’s what OverDrive and 3M use. It controls the download of e-pub files to supported devices. To my knowledge, only the Internet Archive and the Douglas County (Colo.) Libraries (DCL) have adopted ACS for use in a library setting. That should change.
• Visual display on the library catalog, a large screen LCD powerwall, and a mobile application. One of the biggest questions in the twenty-first century will be how do people find the book they’re looking for? Libraries are a big answer to that. As much as 80 percent of our adult circulation is driven by displays. Less than 20 percent is driven by catalog searches. It’s reasonable to think that a similar pattern might be true of e-books. This is our solution to the sociability and serendipity of browsing––touchscreen displays based either on community use (popularity, ranking, newness) or private use (your own reading history on a mobile app).
• A link to purchase. In an effort to demonstrate our value to publishers and authors, we’re experimenting with inserting either generic links (to Tattered Cover, our amazing local independent bookstore or Amazon) or specific links (to an author or distributor website) for titles. That way, if the patron sees that an item is on hold and doesn’t want to wait, or wants to buy something he or she enjoyed, they just click through. We started tracking this recently. Between October 20 and October 31, 2011, there were 653 click-throughs, about evenly split between the independent bookstore and Amazon.
• Building this infrastructure took about a year, and we’re still tweaking it. But it works. It allows us to take what was successful under an old paradigm (the value of discount-based ownership, integration of content, and fair payment to publisher and author) and incorporate modern elements (industry standard copyright protection, full-text indexing of digital content, secure cloud-based access,) that give it immediate new life.

I have to ask, as Sanchez asked me, “Why would a publisher object to that? It’s what we’ve been doing for over 100 years!”

Partnerships

Now all we need are people willing and able to sell to us. So far, it hasn’t been difficult to find them. First, we approached the Colorado Independent Publishers Association. Their members produce many fine books––many of which hadn’t wound up in our libraries. This reveals the myopic focus of many libraries on just the Big Six publishers. Independents were eager to break into a new market, and intrigued by the experiment of preparing their best––EVVY award winners, in this case––for e-publication.

We learned a lot from this early partnership. Among our lessons were:

• A lot of publishers are still trying to figure out how to produce a clean and consistent EPUB file. A lot of them had to be sold on EPUB as a format: many knew how to do PDF files (which flow poorly on e-reader devices), or the Amazon mobi format. But EPUB, we told them, was the wave of the future––an open standard.
• A lot of new companies are springing up to help publishers produce such files.
• We needed to set up two kinds of upload options: single and batch.
• We need to think through cataloging workflow.
• Amazon influences even small publisher pricing, driving it down. The Amazon price is the lowest price; if a publisher sells their title at a discount to libraries, Amazon will lower their own price to match.
• We needed to generate a strong PR buzz for every new publisher that signed up with us. At this point, no one model has settled down or been generally adopted. If we want our model––library-owned and managed content––to win, then we have to promote it.
• We needed to think through the terms. Was it necessary to do a complex contract with each publisher, or could we simply hold to some general principles (one person uses it at a time, we give you a link through, etc.)?

Since then, we’ve formed agreements with reference publisher Gale/Cengage. They get it. Without any kind of contract, they simply provided MARC records and files for the titles we’d already purchased. And here we made another discovery: Ownership and integration of files meant that we now had federated searching. We’ve been doing some experiments with full-text indexing and realized that it gave us the ability not only to solve some cataloging workflow problems, but to far more tightly knit together a variety of resources.

We were particularly excited to sign children’s publisher Lerner––and to add interactive children’s books to our growing collection.

We have recently signed an agreement with the Independent Publishers Group, a coalition of some seven hundred publishers. We are in discussions with many others, including some cautious but interested talks with HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster. One particularly interesting discussion was with the faculty of a local University of Phoenix campus. They’d like to contribute some Creative Commons textbooks for their students.

These days, every trip to a conference involves a visit to exhibitors asking a simple question: Will you sell us your e-books? I believe, as time goes by, more of them will. And those that do will get a larger percentage of our budget.

Library as Publisher

We realized that, after installing and configuring our new system, we are now in the position of owning not just a distribution platform. We could ourselves be publishers. To that end, we’ve been talking to some local historians and film producers to investigate what other content we might gather and disseminate.

Our library has more than two million physical visitors each year, and another two million virtual visitors. All of them are looking for books, movies, and music.
There are many ways we could start a conversation with them, for example, inviting them:

• to help us crowdsource collection development (a possible experiment where we’ll take anything, but we only keep what our community uses and ranks well);
• to help others write better (by working as copyeditors or indexers, for instance);
• to contribute cover art;
• to conduct and contribute interviews of local people;
• to attend, or deliver a workshop on writing quality works; or
• to serve as citizen journalists, attending meetings, posting reports, and/or ranking the writing of others.

First the West, Then the Rest

For the time being, DCL will run a mixed-digital environment. That is, what our patrons want, and can only be leased, we will lease. But we will give preference to 3M over OverDrive, because 3M explicitly states that we own the titles. And we will give preference to publishers who sell to us directly over 3M because we can achieve a higher degree of integration if we possess the file. We will also begin to explore the exciting world of quality content creation.
The library belongs at the center of this revolution, not at its periphery.

DCL can’t be the only institution willing to invest some time, effort, and finances into setting up their own content management infrastructure. We need partners and colleagues to catch the eye of the marketplace.

Our first official team-up will be between DCL and the Marmot Library Network (a consortium serving much of the Western Slope of Colorado).

But this is an ideal cooperative effort for multistate regional networks, state libraries, in-state systems, or other smaller regional cooperatives.

The key features are:

• purchasing discounts to demonstrate the value of the publicly funded buying cooperative that is the public library;
• ownership of the file, both for preservation and to ensure the highest possible degree of integration and seamless user interface, the better to connect creators with consumers;
• industry standard DRM for those who need it;
• open source tools; and
• a bold and confident engagement in the emerging revolution of content creation.

Interested? Start at vufind.org and www.adobe.com/products/contentserver. Don’t forget to check out our website.

In this time of disruption, the relationships between powers will change. Many institutions will be challenged. I think public libraries just might be the last ones standing.

REFERENCES

1. Julianne Pepitone, “Amazon Sales Pop as Kindle Books Overtake Paperbacks,” CNN Money, Jan. 27, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
2. Kristen Purcell, “E-reader Ownership Doubles in Six Months,” Pew Research Center Publications, June 27, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
3. “Traditional Book Output Up 5%; Nontraditional Soars,” Publishers Weekly, May 18, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
4. Michael Kelley, “Kansas State Librarian Goes Eyeball to Eyeball with OverDrive in Contract Talks,” Library Journal, April 6, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
5. American Library Association, “Marketing to Libraries, ALA Library Fact Sheet 5,” accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
6. Barbara Fister, “Publishers & Librarians: Two Cultures, One Goal,” Library Journal, May 1, 2009, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
7. Andrew Albanese, “Survey Says Library Users Are Your Best Customers,” Publishers Weekly, Oct. 28, 2011, accessed Jan. 20, 2012.
8. Ibid.
9. Joseph Sanchez, personal interview with the author.

The post The Last One Standing first appeared on Public Libraries Online.

Never in all of my years strolling through the stacks of my neighborhood library branch did I think that, one day, I would see my name on the spine of a book housed on those very shelves.  As it happens, I recently had the unique experience to co-author a local history book with a good friend of mine.  This volume, which hit the streets as of President’s Day 2013, chronicles the nearly 250 year history of the Perry Hall Mansion, the very first residence built in what today is known as Perry Hall, Maryland, my home town.

The book itself it an illustrated history of this significant historic residence, and is part of the “Images of America” series put out by Arcadia Publishers of South Carolina.  This chronicle consists of over 200 images, personal accounts of surviving residents, and original source documents to vividly tell the story of Perry Hall Mansion.

Having now gone through the process of writing and editing a book, I can definitely tell you that it required a good bit of time and a lot of hard work.  My co-author Sean Kief and I spent a lot of time in identifying the best images to include in this book.  Both of us wanted to ultimately have a volume that was at once both informative and yet accessible to readers of varied interests.  Some people are often turned-off by the prospect of reading non-fiction, with history books in particular often seeming too dense for the typical reader.

As it happens, both my co-author and I have strong connections to public libraries.  Sean himself worked part-time during high school at BCPL’s Loch Raven branch, and his mother has worked for many years in the administrative offices for the system.  I truly believe that the strong links that he and I both shared with our local libraries were invaluable in offering a perspective on what would actually make a book readable and even enjoyable for public library customers.

Now that the book has actually been published – after nearly one year’s worth of research, writing, and editing – our attention turns to the process of making the general public aware of the book itself.  Here again, my co-author and I have been keen on making sure that public libraries have a central role in this process.

Later this year, we will be conducting a book talk and signing at the Perry Hall branch of BCPL.  There couldn’t be a more ideal venue for this sort of event, given that Historic Perry Hall Mansion, Inc. (the volunteer preservation group that Sean and I both help to lead) donated a series of three oil paintings of the mansion to the branch upon its opening in 2009.  Both of us will also be participating in a local author’s event hosted by the nearby Harford County Public Library, to be held at its Bel Air, Maryland branch.

Years of visiting, working, or even volunteering at public libraries can indeed offer the experience and perspective required to create the sort of books that might have appeal for the reading public.  If nothing else, it certainly doesn’t hurt to find a topic that appeals to your local community, write a compelling narrative, and then perhaps even help your library to advance its mission of giving readers what they want.

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