Posted by: site admin @ 2:55 pm
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
For the past 29 years, academic librarians and academic publishers have gathered in Charleston, SC, in early November to discuss common “Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition.” In 1980, it was an informal group of 20 sharing problems and brainstorming solutions—now, the Charleston Conference hosts more than 1,000 attendees every year. This past November, while the hallways seemed less crowded than in 2007 (before the current economic decline had taken hold), plenary sessions were still filled to capacity and the program was overstuffed with interesting topics. Despite its growth, the conference maintains its reputation for collegial professionalism between publishers and academics—and still puts the emphasis on practical knowledge sharing over visionary set pieces.
One particularly well-conceived panel of interest to AAUP members was a session on the e-Duke Books project subtitled “What have we learned?” The session featured Michael McCullough, Sales Manager at Duke University Press; Lois Schultz, the Duke librarian handling cataloging and MARC record creation for the e-book collection; a Georgia State University librarian who acquired the collection; and a representative of collection vendor YBP. The session was a frank discussion from all sides of how an innovative e-book experiment was developed, and the real challenges they met.
Other AAUP members spoke at sessions on how the economy affects editorial programs and on advising librarians on best practices in publishing. Doug Armato, University of Minnesota Press Director, and Kevin Guthrie, Ithaka President, spoke at the annual “I Hear the Train A Comin’” plenary, focused on what’s around the bend in scholarly communications. Many of the plenary sessions were recorded and are being made available, after editing, at http://www.katina.info/conference/video.php.
The official 2009 Charleston tagline was “Necessity is the mother of invention,” but another, one-word theme seemed prevalent in many sessions and informal conversations: “usage.” In the journals world, usage statistics have long been an important component of pricing and licensing discussions. A detailed presentation on how the Institute of Physics develops journals digital pricing made clear how key the “cost-per-access” data point is (as did several tough questions from purchasing librarians in the audience). As monograph-length scholarship begins to ford the book-journal digital divide, usage statistics are going to have an increasing impact on value perceptions in the book world. Indeed, the GSU librarian mentioned that e-Duke Books’ offering of COUNTER-compliant usage data was a point in its favor.
There are “usage stats” in the print world, too, of course, though they are often more anecdotal and based on the only partial picture of circulation studies. Highly specialized monographs in small fields can be reasonably assumed to have low circulation (or usage). While it is reasonably argued that increased discoverability of e-books may increase even the most esoteric title’s usage, the expectations, standards, and patterns of usage will always be different for books and articles.
The most primal of a book’s “usage stats” is at the base of one of Charleston’s hot topics this year: patron-driven acquisitions. Under this model, books (in whatever media) are not purchased until requested by a library patron. The University of Denver shared details of their demand-driven acquisitions pilot project. Blackwell Book Services maintains the Denver library’s approval plan, and is paid for metadata and profiling work. While certain collections remain on an automatic approval basis (not waiting for a patron request), other books are simply exposed through library systems until a user requests the title. Books are sourced through whatever means will be the appropriate mix of fastest and cheapest, and patrons are given the choice of print and/or e-books when possible. Denver selectors continue to do their usual job of selecting library acquisitions up to the point of purchase. At the end of the pilot, selectors’ choices will be compared to user requests and general collection needs to see if this model will continue.
While the Denver librarians talked of this experiment, their hometown was host to another relevant conference, Educause. There, the overlapping ideas of e-books and library-catalog-as-storefront were implicated in Syracuse University librarian Suzanne Thorin’s bombshell statement that “the library, as a place, is dead.” The basic research tool of browsing the stacks may be taken out of the toolbox, with online search and discovery serving as a substitute (though not a replacement). Days later, Thorin faced an uprising of scholars on her own campus protesting the plans to move part of the Syracuse print collection to a storage facility more than 200 miles away. The bits and bytes and algorithms are thriving, but the stacks have life in them yet. Back in Charleston, publishers and librarians strive each year to bring some harmony to the resulting clamor of scholarly communications.
Despite tough economic times and tightened travel budgets, nearly 500 members of the scholarly publishing community turned out in Philadelphia for the 2009 AAUP Annual Meeting. As always, the sense of collegiality and community that is a hallmark of AAUP pervaded the meeting from the first plenary sessions through till the late night receptions.
Two pre-meeting workshops got AAUP’s time in Philadelphia off to a great start, as the nearly 35 registrants for each had the chance to devote a day or more to hear from their colleagues on how they have faced some of the most pressing challenges publishers face in the digital era. “Rights and Permissions in a Digital Marketplace” attracted staff from all areas of university press publishing, and provided valuable information on how some presses are dealing with the challenge of digital rights and content. “Electronic Marketing” was also well received and featured lively discussions on topics from effectively utilizing social networking media to the relative benefits of “giving away” content.
Attendees came together on the first night of the meeting for the Opening Banquet, where they were welcomed by Executive Director Peter Givler. Historian Michael Zuckerman delivered the keynote speech, in which he took the unusual tack of describing the histories of “horses, and watches, and perhaps a bit about radio and newspapers,” in order to demonstrate that “many reports of many technological deaths have been greatly exaggerated.” He closed memorably by exhorting the audience: “when we go— if we go—let’s go gloriously, honorably, and, above all, joyously. There’s no crying in publishing.”
The Opening Banquet also saw the presentation of the 2009 AAUP Constituency Award to Tony Crouch.
Panel and roundtable sessions covered a wide variety of issues facing university presses today from formatting books for e-readers, to connecting the press with the parent university to the always popular “best practices” sessions in which colleagues share both what has worked well for them and what they wish they had not done.
The annual meeting is always a time of transition in AAUP leadership, as the current president becomes the past-president, and the president-elect assumes the reins. Alex Holzman, 2008-2009 AAUP President, gave his farewell address to the membership on June 19, in which he advocated for finding a new model for e-book production and distribution, despite the many challenges that will need to be worked out along the way.
The next afternoon, Kathleen Keane assumed leadership of the AAUP as she gave her inaugural address.
One of the most memorable talks of the meeting, and surely the most controversial, was Michael Jensen’s “Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity,” part of Plenary 4 on Directions in Open Access Publishing. Now available on YouTube, the recording of his talk has now received over 1,000 views – not bad for a video on scholarly publishing! In his talk Jensen advocated that presses move towards a digital publishing model with a focus on open access, as a means of saving not only university press publishing, but civilization as a whole. Detailing frightening signs of environmental collapse, he implored the audience: “Please don’t think of me as a doomer – but I hope I’ve scared the hell out of you.” Judge for yourself at: http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/scarcity.html
If you were not able to attend the meeting, missed a session because of another held simultaneously, or simply want to have a second look at the presentations, many are available via the Annual Meeting Wiki and the online program.
Recordings of the entire meeting, individual sessions, and the Electronic Marketing Workshop are all available from Conference Media.
The 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting will be held June 17-20 in Salt Lake City at the Salt Lake Marriott Downtown. The 2010 Annual Meeting Program Committee, chaired by Greg Britton (Publisher, Getty Publications), will meet in September to discuss ideas for the program. If you have ideas for sessions or wish to participate, please e-mail Greg Britton at gbritton@getty.edu. We hope to see you there!
Posted by: site admin @ 9:09 am
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Laments on the plight of the monograph abound of late, but Duke University Press is attempting to shake things up with its new program, the e-Duke Books Scholarly Collection. Modeled on the pricing structure of the e-Duke Journals Scholarly Collection, e-Duke Books offers online access to at least 100 new titles per year to subscribing libraries, in addition to access to many of the press’s backlist titles.
Michael McCullough, sales manager for the press, explained that director Steve Cohn “has been a driving force behind this for a number of years,” and had long been seeking to address “two separate but complementary problems,” that is, the decline in sales to academic libraries, and the challenge of finding the best way to make the press’s books available in digital form. As Cohn saw these two issues converging, he and his staff began to look into ways to address them, while “control[ling] our content as much as possible,” and without using multiple aggregators.
The e-Duke Books collection will include at least 100 new electronic books published by the press each year. The press typically publishes 115-120 new titles in a given year, and plans to include the great majority of these titles in the collection, excluding only “titles of regional or popular interest or titles to which Duke does not hold electronic rights.”
The press launched a pilot version of the program in 2008, with the participation of 19 US and Canadian libraries. Following a successful run with the pilot program, the press launched a full version in 2009. Collection prices are based on institutions’ 2005 Basic Carnegie Classifications, and range from $500 to $6,000 per year.
By ordering, libraries also receive access to the over 900 Duke University Press backlist books which are currently available in digital form. As the program continues, this backlist will grow in two ways. The 100+ new books that are included in the collection in a given year will become part of the backlist in subsequent years. Additionally, Duke expects to continue the work of digitizing older titles, further increasing the scope of their available backlist.
Offering such a large swath of its backlist as part of the collection required a substantial amount of digitization work. Some of the press’s titles had already been digitized through BiblioVault, funded by a grant which offered free or low-cost digitization services to university presses. That provided a head start for the press, although the remaining titles have required “fair amount of staff time” from the production department. The digitization efforts will also allow Duke to offer a single-title purchase model of e-books to libraries beginning this summer.
The press’s files are currently digitized as web-ready PDFs, with some of the conversion being handled by their partner, ebrary. The ebrary platform also allows full-text searching, and ensures that Duke’s content is cross-searchable with all ebrary content to which a library has access.
One particularly interesting aspect of Duke’s program is the option to purchase a $500 “print add-on option,” which will include cloth editions of all titles in the current year’s collection. Kimberly Steinle, Duke’s Library Relations Manager, indicated that this has been a very popular option among subscribers, with an uptake rate of more than 75%. She noted that the press wanted to ensure this was an optional add-on, rather than a requirement, as some smaller- to medium-sized libraries may not have the space for all of the books. Not requiring libraries to purchase the add-on also helps ensure that the electronic collection is as inexpensive as possible.
The option also fits well with the way the press envisions users accessing the titles. McCullough said he feels “students still don’t really want to read 40 pages at a time on screen,” and that he anticipates library patrons will more likely “discover the book online, and if they want to read more, we want to make that as easy as possible.” Having a cloth edition of the book available on the shelf facilitates this sort of fluidity.
Piracy issues have been a major concern for university presses of late, particularly with the advent of new e-publishing projects. While acknowledging that they are concerned with piracy in the same way as other university presses, McCullough explained that Duke feels the technology they are using successfully avoids any major risks. Ebrary’s printing and downloading restrictions were attributes that made the company a particularly attractive partner for Duke. With the ebrary technology, users are streaming the content, rather than downloading the material to their own computer. Additionally, ebrary limits the number of pages a user is able to print.
The e-Duke Books FAQ section has a comprehensive delineation of the various user policies of the site license, including interlibrary loan, course packs, electronic reserves, printing, and downloading. Steinle explained that these guidelines were developed in conjunction with ebrary, first looking at ebrary’s guidelines and then tailoring them to best meet the needs of the press’s content. Regarding the printing restrictions for example, she said, “our goal was to try to come as close as possible to how many pages would be in a [typical] chapter.”
Another risk for the press is how this sort of accessibility might affect course adoptions, such a mainstay of many university presses. McCullough said that this is an area in which time will tell how the subscription model affects these sales, but he again pointed to what he had spoken about earlier, that assumption most students still do not want to read book-length material online. Additionally, he pointed out that traditional library sales have not been in competition with paperback course adoptions.
As is the case with so many successful e-publishing initiatives, the press enlisted the help of the university library to provide subscribers to the program with enhanced MARC (MAchine-Readable Cataloging) records. McCullough explained that the press wanted to offer the highest level of metadata available, and thus enlisted the help of the catalogers from the Duke University Perkins/Bostock Library. With the MARC records, the cataloging happens on a chapter level – which results in a “real advantage” for both librarians and patrons. Attesting to the invaluable assistance of the library in this aspect of the project, he said, “we certainly could not be creating them [the MARC records] on our own.” Feedback from librarians was also valuable in making procedural changes to the pilot program, to best tailor the program and its offerings to the needs of libraries.
While hesitant to make any sweeping assessments at this early point in the program’s development, McCullough said the press is “very happy with the way it has gone so far.” He noted that the ability to work with colleagues who have managed the similar e-Duke Journals program has been a great help: “They’ve been through this process before.”
There are of course differences between the two programs, and unique challenges that the e-Duke Books staff is still tackling. While the majority of librarians and patrons are now accustomed to accessing journals electronically, McCullough feels that there is still some need to “sell them on the idea” of accessing books in the same manner. He also noted that librarians may be less likely to take a chance on unfamiliar models in “this challenging economic climate.”
McCullough thinks it is possible that other presses may adopt similar models in the near future, and anticipates that they will each vary them to reflect their press’s particular capacities and strengths. He pointed out that this type of model was particularly well suited to Duke’s publishing program. As their list is reasonably small, they were able to include all of their new titles, while maintaining a workable size for the press and a “cost that would not be prohibitive to libraries.” While some presses may choose to implement similar collections composed of titles in a particular subject area, the interdisciplinary nature of many of Duke’s books made this all-encompassing program a preferable option, as there was no need to fit books into neat categorizations. Duke’s well-known editorial profile as a publisher of interdisciplinary and innovative scholarship seems to have lent itself particularly well to this new model.
Posted by: site admin @ 9:09 am
Daphne Ireland
Director of Intellectual Property and Documentary Publishing, Princeton University Press
Everyone is talking about the Google settlement. On March 13 the Columbia Law School hosted “The Google Settlement: What Will It Mean for the Long Term?” a day-long symposium with exceptional speakers assembled from the publishing, legal, and academic spheres. Conference attendees, including nine rights professionals from AAUP presses, were privileged to hear expert debate on a broad continuum of issues. The day began by considering whether this class action settlement has the effect of legislation, continued with discussion of anti-trust concerns, and moved to projections about the future of book publishing, Google Book Search as compulsory license, and possible complementary orphan works legislation.
The first session of the day was “Legislating through Settlement.” Mary Beth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights, observed that the settlement has a legislative effect without having been considered or approved by Congress. It incorporates aspects of legislation for orphan works, Section 108 library exceptions, treaty obligations, and compulsory licensing. Peters said she had many unanswered questions, including whether the Settlement is actually a compulsory license for the benefit of one company and what effect it might have on foreign authors and journal articles. She found it interesting that she had not been asked by Congress to comment on or study the scope of Settlement.
The technical aspects of the anti-trust question were addressed in “Competition Issues” by Randal C. Picker, Professor of Commercial Law at University of Chicago Law School. He identified in the Settlement three key features to measure how easily they might be multiplied to allow competition: digital files, scope of the rights license, and the mechanism of the Registry. How would competitors gain access to digital scans: will they negotiate anew with libraries for their own access and scanning, or will Google allow copying of their digital files? Is the scope of the settlement’s rights license able to be multiplied among competitors? Is it possible to have multiple registries? For Picker, the core of the settlement is its “one-way most favored nation clause,” which guarantees no other party can be offered license terms that are more favorable than Google’s terms in the settlement. Another anti-trust consideration is that even with competitors in this digital marketplace, Google could privilege its own book material through its Google search engine results ranking. Picker sketched an intriguing analogy between Google’s search engine/digital file access regime and the public utility access regime of the nation’s electricity grid. Finally, he explored the idea of the settlement as a compulsory license, where exclusive right holders are required to license works without prior approval on the condition that they receive royalties – similar to ASCAP and BMI in the music industry.
In “The Future of ‘Books’,” Richard Sarnoff, a chairman at Bertelsmann and Chairman of the Board of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), described the settlement as a confirmation of copyright law that sets up a mutually beneficial framework to speed the co-existence of print and digital publishing. Alan Adler, AAP, explained that it looks backward to resolve litigation and creates a path forward by designing a licensing structure to plug in with other competitors. He suggested that publishers may decide to place new works not covered by settlement terms (i.e., those copyrighted after January 5, 2009) under a Google Partner Program contract, the terms of which will likely parallel settlement terms. Lois Wasoff, former counsel at Houghton Mifflin, confessed to everyone’s relief that the settlement is “a little tough to get your arms around.” Business model and contract differences mean implications will be different among trade publishers, STM publishers, and university presses. Wasoff reported that most publishers will likely opt-in to the settlement, remove many of their works, and continue to participate in Google Book Search through the Partner Program. Richard Sarnoff summarized it well: “If you look at the settlement, there’s one thing that’s shot absolutely through it. It is the rights holder’s choice—in every possible circumstance—that rules what happens with the rights holder’s works. Outside of what I hope will be a radically shrinking number of truly orphaned works that are never claimed by anyone (and even within those, I hope with the right legislation we can handle them more actively), you are going to have the rights holder deciding whether the book will be in there in the first place, what the display uses are… and pricing…The entire settlement is set up with the full flexibility to decide how their work is to be used by Google or by anybody else.”
Authors’ opinions were surveyed in the panel “Authors and Incentives.” Jan Constantine, counsel for the Authors’ Guild, can see no downside for authors whose works are out-of-print, and applauded the development that authors and publishers will now move forward in mutual agreement about how works will be offered digitally. Arthur Klebanoff, a publisher and literary agent, highlighted the involvement of author estates in Book Rights Registry claims. In another vein, he commented that publishers will want to take care to remove previous editions of books from the Google offerings, to prevent inaccurate scholarship and edition confusion. Tracy Armstrong, President of Copyright Clearance Center, pondered the ramifications of Google Book Search, which she said certainly will include more self-publishing by authors. Armstrong speculated that one day Google Book Search’s ubiquitous user-interface could become a storefront for self-publishing intermediaries, such as iUniverse and Blurb. She wondered about legitimate incentives for competitors since Google enjoys the “first-mover advantage from this ‘ask forgiveness, not permission’ model”, and regretted that some parties might therefore imitate that illicit model.
“The Public Interest” panelists discussed whether the settlement sidestepped library and public interest and whether other industries might use this class action structure to settle their legislative issues. In his opening statement, Alex MacGillivray, counsel at Google, said “Google is in this to make search better,” to create access for researchers regardless of whether their library is financially privileged, and to serve the needs of the print-disabled. MacGillivray echoed Alan Adler’s earlier observation that the Registry will be able license the corpus to third parties. Robert Darnton, Professor and Director of Harvard University Library, thoughtfully expressed that the settlement creates the possibility of a reader’s utopia. However, he said that the Google Book Search corpus is so rich and unique that competition may be impossible. He also expressed concern that the settlement gives Google a “monopoly in fact” and that there is too great a potential for abuse of power by “ratcheting up prices” for institutional subscriptions over time, a practice he termed “cocaine pricing.” But not all monopolies are bad, in particular those providing public services. Memorably, Darnton quoted an old General Motors motto, having adapted it to: “What’s good for Google is good for the United States.” He openly invited Congress to examine the settlement and its effect on public interest. Jeffrey Cunard, counsel for AAP at DeBevoise & Plimpton, expanded on the notion that the Registry can be a licensing agency, adding that it could administrate a compulsory license for non-commercially available works, should Congress decide to enact such a license. James Grimmelman, Associate Professor at New York Law School, was insightful and brief. He is concerned about concentrated power: direct price setting, a single dominant cultural source, preservation and quality issues, changing fair use, library Section 108, first-sale doctrine, and the incentive to remain exclusive. Grimmelman believes the settlement is workable with discrete changes, which include guarantees about privacy, making the Registry accountable through transparency and oversight by the Federal Trade Commission, and a modified “most favored nation clause.” He believes this class-action settlement risks interpretation as a privately negotiated substitute for orphan works legislation.
Threaded through every panel were the topics of “out-of-print” and “non-commercially available works,” at times imprecisely discussed as “orphan works.” Google’s exclusive possession of digital scans of orphan works from libraries is an indicator of monopoly. Yet all agreed that the settlement’s greatest impact is the creation of new access to non-commercially available works. In Paul Courant’s words: “What I’ve gotten out of today is that absolutely everybody thinks that meaningful orphan works legislation would greatly improve the quality of this settlement.” Google and AAP have actively supported orphan works legislation for several years (as has AAUP). Access to truly orphan works is certainly in the public’s interest. In listening to panelists, one can imagine Congress considering orphan works legislation in the form of a compulsory license to be administered by the Registry.
There have been a couple of developments since the outstanding March conference. On April 28, the Federal District of New York postponed the deadline for right holders to opt-out and/or file oppositions to the settlement, which is now September 5, 2009. In a separate move on the same day, the Justice Department announced its inquiry into the settlement’s anti-trust issues.
There were many more speakers and compelling ideas, but this report attempts only to trace a continuum, highlighting possible long-term implications. It is likely the settlement will be approved in some form at some point in the coming year, and it has surely awakened interest on all sides.
Peter Givler was instrumental in planning the conference and roster of distinguished speakers. The following university press attendees enjoyed this stellar symposium, as well as each others’ views and good company at lunch: Lisa Bayer, Barbara Cohen, Carol Hupping, Daphne Ireland, Linda Klein, Mindy Koyanis, Jill Phillips, Clare Wellnitz, and Vicky Wells. No briefing can adequately convey the depth of the conference; fortunately, a video is available online. For details and discussion, please watch the symposium at http://kernochancenter.org/Googlebookssettlementrecording.htm
Posted by: site admin @ 11:47 am
Perspectives on Publishing Personal Essays on Nature and Environment
by Ann Wendland
This article was first published in The Exchange, Spring 2003.
University presses have a proud tradition of regional publishing. It is an area that fulfills a stated mission of many AAUP members— to publish for and about the communities that surround and support them. Regional publishing can also be an opportunity for a press to build a strong trade publishing program, and some regional titles have the potential for national appeal. Literary nonfiction that emphasizes nature and environment is one of the most important and vibrant genres within regional publishing. Ann Wendland, Publicity Manager at the University of Arizona Press and Exchange Contributing Editor, has undertaken to explore the place of writing of place within the changing worlds of publishing, writing, and reading. In this issue she talks to editors and publishers; look to future issues for perspectives on these titles from the marketing and sales departments.
The View from the Editor’s Desk
Literary nonfiction about the places where we live has held its own through these tough times. An April 28 Publisher’s Weekly feature attributes the success to the uplifting spirit of books about nature and their focus on areas close to home in times when Americans have cut travel.
After talking with five of the best editors and publishers in the field, I believe that these books have enduring success because their intense specificity, powerful writing, and close attention create transcendent experiences for readers in a time that is otherwise dislocated, hurried, and unfocused. A great essay is a big moon rising behind the streetlights and exhaust—all of our forgotten wonder and longing for life come brimming up.
Barbara Ras, now director of Trinity University Press, created and shaped stellar environmental literature lists as an editor at University of Georgia Press and Sierra Club Books. Ras, who won the Walt Whitman Award for her own poetry collection, Bite Every Sorrow (LSU), has published such writers as Barry Lopez, Rebecca Solnit, Paul Shepard, David Kline, and Rick Bass.
I asked how she knows when she’s reading important new work with a broad audience.
“It’s hard to predict. You have to gauge the level of raw enthusiasm that you feel as an editor, whether the work possesses that irresistible style and personal magnetism that makes you want to leap over all the obstacles to publish it.”
I wondered if university presses have a special niche in publishing personal essays on nature and environment; Ras doesn’t consider it a niche so much as an opportunity.
“University presses have a better shot at publishing some of these books because the New York houses need to be certain of high sales.” She also sees our regional readers as significant assets.
“In my experience, trying to break out a regional book to a national audience is overrated. It’s a better strategy to build from a concentrated center and move out in concentric circles.”
I asked Barbara if she sees any trends in the writing.
“Writers are getting more sophisticated and content-conscious. I’m not interested in what Kim Stafford called ‘first-person rhapsodic’ because it’s just too bland and vapid. I’m interested in something that’s going to deliver local lore and legend, culture, history, and natural history—coherent useful knowledge that not only informs you about a place but instructs you about how to be in the world.”
Emilie Buchwald is newly publisher emeritus of Milkweed Editions, the small press that has profoundly shaped the field of personal essays on nature and environment. Milkweed publishes series including Credo and Literature for a Land Ethic, and has recently published Janisse Ray, Annick Smith, William Kittredge, Alison Deming, Terry Tempest Williams, and many others vital to this field.
Buchwald feels that she’s discovered significant work with broad appeal if “a writer has written with verve about place—highly localized place. The more details the better. The best writing is made vivid by the choice of details that will make readers everywhere able to take part imaginatively in the writing.”
When I asked about trends in the genre, Emilie answered, “I see writers recognizing that their greatest strength lies in writing about a place they feel inside their bones.
“I would like to see writing that is not merely elegiac—about the loss of place—but filled with ideas for how to preserve, rebuild, rewild and rethink the issue. I don’t know whether that’s a trend, but it’s certainly the kind of book I’m interested in. We’ve just published Janisse Ray’s Wild Card Quilt, which represents exactly that kind of attitude.”
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of the University of Arizona Press, Gregory McNamee is a highly regarded essayist and anthologist. McNamee edits Arizona’s new Desert Places series, in which writers and photographers work together to portray their experience of a favorite corner of the desert.
I asked Gregory if he thought university presses would, and should, continue to be important publishers of personal essays on nature and environment.
“A university press
properly situated should stake claim for its region,” Gregory answered.
“It has the constituency and the tradition of literary quality and
excellence—from natural history to landscape writing. Editors should
look for good books that interpret the places we live and, indeed,
advocate for them.”
Why does some place-based work fascinate readers
everywhere? Gregory feels the stories transcend place to make a
difference in the world.
“It’s the quality of work, not the familiarity
of setting that’s important to readers. No one calls Walden a regional
book.”
I asked Gregory what trends he saw, or hoped he saw, in the
literature.
“There’s been a powerful strain of rhetorical posing,
self-indulgence, and moralism in nature writing,” Gregory commented.
“The genre could benefit from a purging of this moralism.” He sees the
writing becoming even more resistant to categorization and working
along the connections between art, literature, and science. He
celebrates the trend toward writing about livable cities and lived-in
landscapes, rather than pristine nature.
Mary Elizabeth Braun, an
acquisitions editor at Oregon State University Press, also sees nature
writing venturing into cities and into multiple fields. Oregon is well
known for a distinguished list that investigates life in the Northwest
from every angle—from macrolichen guidebooks to edgy essays.
Asked
about trends, Mary answered that current environmental concerns have
strongly affected the field, that writing is expanding beyond
traditional wilderness settings, and that the cadre of authors is
changing.
“Rather than just penning rhapsodic tributes to the wonders
of supposedly pristine nature,” Mary said, “writers are working to
educate and motivate their readers—tackling health, food, agriculture, and quality of-life issues, and paying more attention to environmental justice.”
Nature and science writers are writing about urban and suburban environments in books such as Sagebrush and Cappucino (Sierra Club), Suburban Wild (Georgia), and City Wilds (Georgia). More people trained in the natural sciences are writing books for broad audiences, often including personal narratives such as bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss (Oregon).
With all the expansion and diversification in the field, what does an editor home in on?
“The primary quality I look for is fluid, intelligent writing. Secondary qualities include a subject matter of timely interest, a good fit with our list, and an author willing to help promote the book.”
I asked Mary if she thought that university presses have unique advantages in this area.
“Perhaps we do, although many of the more notable titles in recent years have come from commercial houses, not just university presses. We may be in a better position because we’re willing to take risks on such books, which may be written by less well known writers than a commercial house might want. Also, such authors and books may receive closer attention from university presses.”
Karen Orchard is the new director of Oregon State University Press and former director of the University of Georgia Press. Georgia grew into one of the country’s best mid-sized presses in Karen’s 28 years there, establishing exceptional fiction, poetry, and literary nonfiction lists.
She and I talked about the national appeal of place-specific work like Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Milkweed), much of which is set in a junkyard.
“When the author is a master storyteller and you know that, it doesn’t matter whether the junkyard was in south Georgia or northern California—what matters is the truth and power of the story.”
She feels that university presses have claimed a special place in publishing personal essays on nature and environment.
“At a time when authors of short fiction collections were having difficulty finding publishers, a few university presses (Georgia, LSU, Pittsburgh, and Illinois among them) made ongoing commitments to publishing book-length short fiction and contributed to a renaissance of that genre. I think that the same has been true more recently for literary nonfiction.
“Essays on nature and the environment, in particular, are a good fit for regional trade publishing programs. Those titles often hold the promise and possibility of breaking into the national trade. They have done especially well on the regional trade lists of university presses because we are very good at reaching their core market—general readers who care deeply about the place they call home.
“These books also often present opportunities for building on strengths a press already has. When I became director of the University of Georgia Press in the mid-1990s, one of the initiatives we pursued was an interdisciplinary list in environmental studies. Our tradition of literary publishing made creative works a natural addition to the scholarly studies, handbooks, and field guides that we planned for that list.”
Personal essays about nature appear to be venturing off of high ground to risky, complex new turf— our own very diverse homes. Because home is where the heart is, these essays engage and provoke readers.
According to AAUP’s “The Value of University Presses,” our publishing programs promote engagement with ideas, preserve the distinctiveness of local cultures, and sustain a literate culture. Perhaps we have a special opportunity to distinguish our presses in this genre because so many of our goals and strengths are at work in it.
Posted by: site admin @ 10:45 am
Place-Based Personal Essays with the Power to Change Us
by Ann Wendland
Originally published in The Exchange, Winter 2004.
This is the final article in a series about publishing creative nonfiction that emphasizes place and nature. The first article shared the viewpoints of acquiring editors, the second featured interviews with booksellers with outstanding records selling this genre, and the third focused on marketing. This final article takes a step back to suggest the telltale signs of the next Thoreau, analyze the earlier articles for an overall look at trends, and offer a few compelling reasons for University presses to publish in this genre. The writer, Ann Wendland, has been Publicity Manager at the University of Arizona Press for three years. She is moving to Boulder, Colorado, and would be happy to respond to any comments on this article; e-mail her at wendland@earthlink.net.
Jacket-copy comparisons of new nature writers to Henry David Thoreau or Rachel Carson (if female) have been made on such a regular basis as to keep both of these greats in a perpetual spin in their graves. In fact, Thoreaus and Carsons aren’t popping up daily. Many place-based memoirs and collections of personal essays run thick with rhapsody, enlightenment, moral outrage and despair, but very few generate sweeping activism and alter our views of nature and of ourselves the way that Carson and Thoreau did.
How can publishers identify stand-out work with potential to make a tremendous social impact—in advance of the rapid-fire of reviews, the J-curve of sales, and the appearance of the author on the Today Show and the House and Senate floors?
The old-fashioned way, say editors: look at the writing. And what do they look for?
Verve, irresistible style and personal magnetism, transcendence, masterful storytelling, and fluid, intelligent writing are the qualities editors singled out when interviewed for the first article in this series.
The booksellers who shared their experience selling place-based writing agree with the editors. Their reports from the field show readers turning away from “general feel-good work that’s less grounded” and toward writing with strong, well-written narrative, a reflective, personal style and lots of interesting detail. Linda Ramsdell, a bookseller in Vermont, sees clienteles merging as more science shows up in essays and more reflection appears in science-writing. Melissa Sanders, in Salt Lake City, believes that customers involved in activism and environmental work relate more easily to writers whose work includes deliberation on culture than to the earlier naturalists.
Editors and readers are looking for the same traits in these books: powerful narrative, fascinating information, and insightful reflection.
The reflection in place-based writing is unusual. It sustains a singular cultural conversation that’s important to American identity and social development. Writers speak from a specific place—as small as Thoreau’s reflecting pool or as large as Carson’s U.S. farmland—to show us how we look from the outside and how we’re operating in relation to other life. The intertwined reflection on people and nature distinguishes nature writing from science writing, which shines its light at natures other than our own, and from outdoor sports writing, which focuses on empowerment and really big blisters, with nature as enabling mechanism.
Another identifying characteristic of books that shake up culture is that they sell. Any book that’s going to make a big difference in a place has to get a critical mass of people in that place talking. Editors can predict marketability through their long perspective on developments in the field. Booksellers can help by telling us what their readers want from those shelves of nature writing and regional books.
Readers want imaginative, enthusiastic engagement, but in this genre, there’s a hurdle for writers to leap before they can provide it. They must suspend our disbelief that nature matters. It takes a dose of disbelief in the significance of nature just to get through a day. Mindboggling impact to the places we live combines nastily with increasingly busy lives; and both the casual indifference of industry and the moralistic orientation of the environmental movement have made intimacy with place seem a tedious and discouraging duty, not a continuing pleasure. So, how do writers suspend our disbelief and reengage us?
Writers recognize that their greatest strength lies in writing about a place they feel inside their bones, says Milkweed Publisher Emeritus Emilie Buchwald. Great work, she feels, is crammed with details about a highly localized place, each chosen to bring readers there in their imaginations. The writers live for the places they write about. The initial attraction of their strange ardor turns to intrigue and then to full engagement for the reader.
Two western booksellers, Utah’s Sanders and Cathy Langer of Colorado’s Tattered Cover, share the sense that people increasingly want to experience the place they live deeply. Now that nature writers are publishing work set in cities, rural places, and suburbs (a trend confirmed by every editor interviewed), they’re in a perfect position to answer this hunger for connection.
Booksellers from Vermont to Utah to Washington say that they’re finding the clientele for placebased nonfiction expanding and diversifying. The wider audience expects exploration of issues from a variety of viewpoints, even opposing viewpoints. Rather than reading broadly in the genre, a growing number of customers select titles that offer more thoughtful, well-rounded and innovative look at particular issues that are important to them.
Editors are looking for work to match these readers’ interests— timely, issue-driven work that investigates many sides of a problem. Mary Elizabeth Braun, of Oregon State University Press, sees writers tackling health, food, agriculture, environmental justice, and quality-oflife issues. Buchwald looks for ideas for how to preserve, rebuild, rewild and rethink. And Barbara Ras of Trinity University Press wants work that not only informs but instructs people about how to be in the world. Rachel Carson might have been excited to see this confluence in the interests of readers, writers, and publishers, the new energy pouring into the search for ways to think about and address issues.
Readers are looking for the next Thoreau, the next Carson, the next great writer who can tell powerful stories, reflect on our culture in relation to the rest of life, teach and provoke us.
University presses, as regional publishers, have a perfect opportunity in this field because we know the places, know the markets, and can take risks on publishing books that might or might not break out to a national audience. The books answer our commitment to help to preserve the distinctiveness of local cultures through publication of works on our home regions. We’re good at discovering talent; once in a great while, we’ll find even those writers who can shake up culture with a book of nature writing.
In The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck says: “A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions.” University presses exist to perpetuate questions, analysis, reflection, and cultural conversation. Place-based creative nonfiction sustains a singular line of inquiry with its intertwined reflection on people and nature. It’s a perfect match.
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
In these economically troubled times, people are hungry for information and knowledge. The news media is essential for the first of those—details on the latest wrangling over the U.S. economic stimulus plan, the latest employment numbers, and a global view of the world-wide effects of the economic crisis. University presses, however, are key to the second: knowledge. For economists’ comprehensive understanding of the roots of the crisis, for historical analysis of how New Deal policies worked to end the Great Depression, and for detailed study of the effects of infrastructure projects on recovery and development, the public can turn to books published by members of the AAUP.
Despite this value of university press output to communities both local and global, we are no more protected from the economic downturn than other sectors of the U.S. economy and culture. The pain has been widely shared. A new survey from AAUP indicates that sales, in both units and dollars, are down 10% across the association.
The survey compared the figures for the six-month period of July to December 2008 to those of the same period in 2007 from sixty-two participating presses. Designed to quickly solicit a general picture of the business climate, the data is a useful tool as individual presses face difficult budget decisions. The association is now looking at rolling together the particular data collected here with the quarterly sales and returns survey that has been conducted since 2003.
That difficult budgetary times are ahead, and in many cases already with us, is unquestionable. Widespread reports of slashed travel budgets forced the cancellation of the 2009 financial managers and production managers meetings. Staff lay-offs at SUNY Press and the U.S. offices of Oxford University Press were an even more sobering sign of the strain felt by university presses from market realities and looming state budget cuts. These last affect not only the presses at public universities, but also the state-affiliated college and research libraries that remain key purchasers of scholarly material.
Perhaps the most shocking news has been the possibility that drastic cuts to the higher education budget of Utah might lead to the shuttering of the press at Utah State University. While a small press on an industry-wide scale, with 5 employees and an output of approximately 20 books a year, within its fields of publication Utah State University Press is an institution of central importance. Numerous award-winning books in rhetoric and composition, folklore, Mormon studies, and Utah history have garnered lasting national and international respect for both the press and Utah State. Despite this reputation, the press has been warned that if the worst case scenario of a 19% cut in state funds comes to pass, the press is on a list of non-essential units that may be eliminated.
The press director, Michael Spooner, has told the Chronicle of Higher Education that he understands the financial pressures that the administration is facing, but that the press is “operationally sound, financially stable, and over-achieving its given mission.” As was pointed out by Peter Givler, executive director of AAUP, while the move may save the university 3.5 salaries in the short run, in the long term they may never be able to afford to rebuild a press of such value or buy back the prestige that will be lost. University presses are not alone in being targeted as non-essential despite serving a core scholarly function. Recent news of the proposed closure of the Brandeis University Rose Art Museum (and sale of its esteemed collection of contemporary art) and the University of Pennsylvania’s move to shut down the research arm of their Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology are equally disturbing signs of the devaluation of a university’s work outside of teaching departments.
Despite these warning signs of potential university press casualties during the coming economic distress, the important work of AAUP members goes on. There are even things to celebrate: Mrs. Ramsay’s Knee, a work of poetry by Iris Anderson published by the Utah State University Press caught the national attention on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” on January 10; SUNY Press announced the publication of Go, Tell Michelle: African American Women Write to the New First Lady in time for the inauguration of Barack Obama. Looking to history provides some promise as well. After all, as the late L.E. Phillabaum and Sheldon Meyer wrote in “What is a University Press?,” the Great Depression saw one of the greatest booms in university publishing.
As the members of AAUP face the fear of a second such depression, the association and its community of colleagues will work together to manage continued technological and economic change creatively and successfully. In addition to the data provided by such efforts as the six-month sales survey, the AAUP Board recently requested the revision and distribution of “Tips for Hard Times” originally put together in 2001. AAUP will continue to develop collaborative services for members, and act as an advocate for members’ work to the wider world. And when the AAUP Annual Meeting gathers in Salt Lake City in June 2010, we very much hope to be returning to a two-press state.
Password information for members-only links.
Posted by: site admin @ 10:55 am
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Thomas Jefferson designed the iconic Rotunda building as the academic center of his newly founded University of Virginia, “demonstrating [his] belief that a university should have as its focus a collection of academic achievements1.” Appropriately, the electronic imprint of the University of Virginia Press takes its name from the campus landmark and fills that same role for the university in today’s digital age. Rotunda has been a stable flagship in the ever-changing realm of electronic publishing since its inception in 2001.
The original grant proposal to the Mellon Foundation for the Electronic Imprint, conceived by Nancy Essig, the former director of the press, and John Unsworth, the founder of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, called for publication of born-digital scholarship. Mark Saunders, Manager of the Electronic Imprint, explained that suitable born-digital projects were scarce at the time. In response, the press’s new director, Penny Kaiserlian, along with a team of senior managers, decided to add digital editions of existing print publications to the imprint’s list, focusing on the press’s strength in critical and documentary editions.
By the start of 2009, Rotunda had published six projects in the 19th-Century Literature and Culture collection and four in the American Founding Era collection, with three more in active development. Two of the 19th-century projects, comparative textual editions of Herman Melville’s Typee and Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences, were in fact born-digital, and benefited from Rotunda’s extensive experience and expanding capabilities. The imprint is also “exploring a new collection in architecture with our colleagues at the Society for Architectural Historians.”
Kaiserlian has described the American Founding Era project as Rotunda’s “most ambitious collection yet.2” This collection brings together documentary editions of the primary and secondary materials that constitute The Papers of George Washington, The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, and The Adams Papers, all in digital format. Forthcoming digital editions include The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, The Papers of James Madison, and the Papers of Alexander Hamilton. Beyond this invaluable content, however, the project is notable for the broad scope of its collaborations with other university presses and historical societies and the extent of its interoperable capabilities.
Early on, the staff at the Imprint made a pivotal decision to develop a more costly platform based on emerging standards for XML rather than focus on PDF delivery as most publishers were doing. This has proved a major boon to Rotunda’s electronic publishing projects, as it has allowed maximum “functionality, flexibility, and scalability.” The staff took advantage of the “significant expertise in textual markup [that] already existed in various digital centers at the University of Virginia.” The staff felt that the nature of the content in the document editions necessitated “that we code at as deep a level as possible.” To achieve this end, the editorial and technical staff chose to go with the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard, which has been developed by an international collective. David Sewell, leader of Rotunda’s staff on XML coding, now sits on the TEI Board of Directors.
Collaboration is an integral aspect of the American Founding Era project. In November 2008, Rotunda announced the release of a newly consolidated Founding Era platform, which makes the various documentary editions fully interoperable. Such a project would have been impossible without the cooperation and collaboration of the various project editors and sponsoring institutions and presses, as the various collections of papers are housed and edited at a variety of institutions. The Rotunda staff was responsible for the platform and the XML coding behind it, and drew up standards for conversion of the print volumes in conjunction with the documentary editors. Saunders described the varieties of expertise provided by some of the other participants:
In the case of the Adams Papers, conversion of the print volumes was managed by the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society. The editors of the Washington Papers worked for many hours to disambiguate index entries to create a cumulative index for their 52-volume project, among other contributions of time and knowledge. The editors of the Jefferson Papers performed display proofreading on the converted files, and the staff of Princeton University Press contributed publishing expertise in rights, permissions, and marketing.
This many-layered collaboration resulted in a platform that allows users to navigate across editions in various ways. Saunders explained that the platform retains the ability for users to “see the documents as they are arranged in the print volumes” while enhancing the experience by also facilitating the ability of users to “search, navigate chronologically, and access the intellectual investment reflected in the indexes.”
The Dolley Madison Digital Edition, Rotunda’s first publication, is the only born-digital edition in the American Founding Era collection. Forthcoming volumes in the collection will be available in print first, to be followed in twelve to twenty-four months by inclusion in the digital edition. The Electronic Imprint’s institution of an XML workflow is enhancing the viability and ease of these dual editions. Commenting on the recent subventions awarded by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC ), Saunders explained that while these were traditional publication subventions for the print volumes, the XML workflow allows forthcoming editions to “be published in print and digital formats using the same underlying edited files, so in effect the continuing investment of the NHPRC in these editions will now pay off in new ways.”
Rotunda’s Founding Era project has been cited by AAUP as an important example of publisher-added value in debates on various models of open access (see AAUP’s Letter of Support for the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act). Saunders said that Virginia has been closely following the debates over various forms of open access “for most of Rotunda’s existence.” In February 2008, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on an issue of open access directly impacting Rotunda and its publications: “The Founding Fathers’ Papers: Ensuring Public Access to our National Treasures.”
In April 2008, Allen Weinstein, then Archivist of the United States, released a report to Congress at the request of the Committees on Appropriations entitled “The Founders Online: Open Access to the Papers of America’s Founding Era.” Appropriately, Thomas Jefferson’s ink and pencil drawing of the South Elevation of the Rotunda is featured on the cover of the report. Weinstein details the ongoing efforts to produce documentary editions of these historical papers that have been in progress for years, or even decades, at various universities, university presses, and historical societies. He outlines two possible responses to the government’s call for online access to the papers: in the first, the government would scan the completed volumes as they become available, but “the volumes would not be electronically marked or indexed, making them difficult to search, and such an effort by a Federal agency would provide an inferior duplication of online publication efforts already taking place outside of Government.” The second option, recognizing the valuable work done by organizations currently involved in the process, Rotunda primary among them, suggests that the government provide support for these efforts including “engag[ing] a sole service provider to undertake transcription and document encoding for all Founding Fathers papers that have not yet been edited.” The staff at Rotunda has appreciated the report’s respect for the work of the project editors and the attention to finding an access model that is sustainable for the university press publishers of the print editions. They expect to resume these discussions with the arrival of a new Archivist and a new Congress.
University presses today are testing a variety of funding models as they attempt to find a balance between providing access to research and information and the necessity of covering operating costs. Saunders says of Rotunda’s business model, “Our interface has always promoted free discovery of our content, but our perpetual access business model has remained largely constant during the debates surrounding the Archivist’s report. At the document level, we remain a fee-based site.” This perpetual access model makes access to Rotunda’s publications available for varying fees, determined by a university’s Carnegie classification, with rates also available for other research institutions, high schools, and unaffiliated individuals. All users are able to browse the contents and conduct searches of the full text, although log-in is required to obtain access to the full contents.
Rotunda’s primary funding has until this point come from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the President’s Office of the University of Virginia, but Saunders explained that its ultimate mandate is to be self-sustaining. As described earlier, Rotunda’s projects are often indirectly supported by entities like the NHPRC, which has provided subventions for the documentary print editions. After the current grants expire, Rotunda’s sustaining revenue is expected to come from sale of its products and from grants for development of future individual projects. In an entrepreneurial move, Rotunda has also started Oculus, “which offers consulting services to other publishers and to digital projects that are in development,” also with the support of the Mellon Foundation.
Rotunda is well poised to continue in its role of presenting the academic achievements that are at the center of a university, both to the academic community, and with the American Founding Era project, to the nation at large.
1 “The Rotunda: History,” The University of Virginia, http://www.virginia.edu/uvatours/rotunda/rotundaHistory.html.
2Penny Kaiserlian, “University of Virginia Press,” in “University Presses 2008: Snapshots in Time,” compiled by Rebecca Ann Bartlett, Journal of Scholarly Publishing 40 (Oct. 2008): 26-28.
Posted by: site admin @ 3:34 pm
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Experiments with electronic publishing platforms and business models are proliferating ever faster these days. Some models are intended to serve the needs of specific fields, while others address the needs of a broad general audience. SUNY Press is now experimenting with a new electronic publishing model to serve a very specific time-and-purpose based market gap. SUNY’s new “Direct Text” makes e-book versions of new hardcover scholarly titles available to the course adoption market—bridging the gap between the hardcover and paperback editions.
Powered by the Publishers Row platform, Direct Text editions are available for $20, which allows purchasers 180 days of online access, plus the ability to download and print the PDF during that 6-month period. SUNY chose to make a free preview available through the platform, as well. The model—180 days for $20—is tailored to the needs of a semester-long class. A new hardcover scholarly monograph may cost anywhere from $40-100, which may prevent price-sensitive professors from assigning it to their (even more price-sensitive) students. Direct Text bridges that gap, making valuable scholarly content available for classroom adoption.
While the real test of SUNY’s experiment will come at the beginning of the Fall 2008 semester, the first sale was made within hours of the program’s soft launch, when the press made 20 titles available for purchase. SUNY expects to offer more than 100 titles by the end of the year.
SUNY has a history of adopting innovative digital models within their tradition of scholarly publication, being the first publisher to launch the co-branded Google Book Search on their web site, allowing full-text search of approximately 4,000 SUNY Press titles. Even now, the Direct Text program is just one of several new initiatives being undertaken by the press. Under the leadership of new director Gary Dunham, previously at the University of Nebraska Press, the press is finalizing the implementation of a customized press-wide database system and launching a new trade imprint, Excelsior Editions, which is set to debut with the Fall 2008 season. Across all their programs, continuing as well as experimental, SUNY Press is taking “Ever Upwards” to heart.
Posted by: site admin @ 9:01 am
Judging of the 2008 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show was held on January 17-18 at the AAUP Office in New York City. Jurors selected a total of 44 books, 2 journals, and 31 jackets and covers.
The 2008 Book, Jacket, and Journal Show will premiere at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Montréal, June 26-29, 2008. The show will then travel around the country from September 2008 to May 2009.
Since 1965, the AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show has fulfilled its mission to “honor and instruct”: honoring the design and production teams whose work furthers a long tradition of excellence in book design, and, through a traveling exhibit and acclaimed annual catalog of selected entries, visually teaching the tenets of good design. 
For the complete list and show details, go to: http://aaupnet.org/programs/marketing/designshow/winners2008.html
Posted by: site admin @ 3:50 pm
By Ann Wendland
Marketing and Sales Manager, University Press of Colorado
Why I chose not to go to AAUP 2007 (and got to go anyway)
Chances are, if you’re in sales and marketing, no-one from your department went to the AAUP meeting in 2007—less than half of the presses represented sent sales and marketing staff. Perhaps you felt that you just couldn’t allocate the time and money. That’s why I chose not to go.
Like yours, my schedule is maxed. A department of one, I’m responsible for every aspect of sales and marketing for the University Press of Colorado. A hundred good causes vie for every minute, and, worse, they tear apart every dollar. AAUP 2007 appeared in my draft budgets, but in the end I felt that I had to reallocate the money.
Questia, which awards three full-ride fellowships to the meeting for employees of small to midsize presses, gave me a grant, so I went after all.
To my surprise, I found that attendance would have paid for itself in directly related net sales within a month. The meeting also helped me free up time and will have long-term sales benefits. Colleagues offered information that contextualized my decisions and lent experience that helped me shape efforts in quickly changing parts of the field and areas in which I’m less knowledgeable.
Free time
Just before the meeting, I’d made a time-dictated change to advertising and exhibit planning that I wasn’t certain would benefit sales. I had been planning ads and exhibits on a book-by-book basis that required extensive research and laborious scheduling. This year, I dedicated 90% of ad and exhibit budgets to recurring venues—journals in which we would advertise regularly and exhibits in our niche subjects. Long-term agreements with ad reps, recurring deadlines, and templates for journal and program ads saved a lot of time, but I felt concerned about narrowing our focus.
]At AAUP 2007, speakers emphasized that in the current climate for university presses, publishing in niches and regularly touching base with target audiences in those niches is the best route to strong sales. The venues I’d chosen for ads and exhibits matched the lists that the director would highlight in the next strategic plan, so I set my concerns aside. Had I not attended, I might have continued to doubt my choice. Now, I can spin it as a shrewd marketing decision to brand the press through repetitive exposure and visual consistency. Really!
Other panelists also freed up time. I cheered (internally) when publicity panelists mentioned that we should just tuck materials into books because press kits get tossed. When colleagues shared their runs of review copies and galleys, which I’d assumed were higher than mine, it turned out that I could stand to trim. Time and money saved.
Free money
Ideas and information from AAUP 2007 gave a quick boost to our sales through bookstores and online vendors, helped me market the press back to member institutions (Colorado is a consortial press), and gave me key information that will support long-term projects.
The quickest boost came from conversations emphasizing the importance of promoting backlist. On returning home, I reviewed our sales with Barnes & Noble, alerting buyers to perennial sellers that B&N had dropped or sold an abnormally low percentage of. They immediately bought hundreds of books for a net sales boost of several thousand dollars. (It’s not much, but it would cover a conference and it took one day.) I worked with sales representatives to develop a backlist promotion offer for independent booksellers.
Several sessions reinforced the value of robust book pages online, especially at Amazon.com. At home, I confirmed that Amazon.com sales have grown since we improved our pages recently. I stepped up efforts, incorporating uploads of reviews and blurbs into regular routines and initiating participation in Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book.” I gave Dial-a-Book the OK to post excerpts on prominent sales sites and ensured that our books turn up in Google BookSearch. These projects might have languished if AAUP 2007 sessions hadn’t reinforced their importance.
For an easy basket, I adopted a speaker’s suggestion to include names of supporting institutions in ads, promoting our member universities to thousands of people. Board members can use that information when they advocate for increased subsidies. Time required: three minutes.
Two long-term priorities for the press—increasing foreign sales and gaining course adoptions through direct mail—require me to build certain knowledge and skills. Related sessions offered the expertise of some of the most successful presses in each area, allowing me to take advantage of what they’d learned over years.
Profitable Conversations
Sales results of serendipitous conversations at AAUP 2007 would be hard to quantify, except to say that the meeting crowds were studded with the very wholesalers and review editors that we allocate significant time and money to meet.
Writers from six book reviews attended. I enjoyed broader conversations with a couple of them than typically occur in publicity meetings. The sessions helped me make more of their reviews, too. Now, I’m quickly posting them online and using them in e-marketing. As suggested by Blackwell’s AAUP delegate, I emailed new Choice and Library Journal reviews to Blackwell and received an immediate response.
A spirit of collaboration drove the meeting: people shared detailed, useful information both in and out of sessions. At every turn, I found a happy chance to meet or reconnect with colleagues from other presses, wholesaler honchos, industry associates, AAUP staff, sales representatives, and consultants with coveted expertise.
In the hotel bar, consultant and former Oxford University Press U.S.A. director Laura Brown sat beside me and we chatted about library sales (a conversation with the co-author of the Ithaka Report on university presses and libraries that I certainly couldn’t have budgeted). Here’s my favorite of her suggestions: take a librarian out to lunch. She had lamented how few publishers talk one-on-one with librarians. The head acquisitions librarians of our public and university libraries were delighted to meet with me and each offered valuable information about recent and upcoming changes in buying methods.
See you next year?
Quick corrections and opportunities that came up at AAUP 2007 saved our press enough and earned enough to pay for the meeting. Long-term benefits of streamlined work and increases in sales will come from key information that people shared in sessions and casual conversations. If, like me, you chose not to go to the 2007 meeting (and if no-one handed you a free pass that made it impossible to resist), I hope I’ll see you in Montréal this June.
Up-to-date information on the 2008 AAUP Meeting can be found at http://aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/
Posted by: site admin @ 3:21 pm
By Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic & Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Long lauded for bringing librarian and publisher partners together to work through common “Issues in Book and Serials Acquisition,” as the subtitle goes, the Charleston Conference has grown in its 27 years from an intimate group of 24 colleagues to a sprawling gathering of more than 1000. Librarians, publishers, and vendors crowded the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina, making their ways to more than 140 sessions in 5 locations. Session topics ranged from presentations of case studies of approval plans to conceptual discussions of “structured serendipity” in content management and everything in between.
E-books were a hot topic at the 2007 conference. It seems as though the matter of e-books is finally coming to a boil; which sales models work for libraries and publishers, how patrons use e-books, and how expanding e-book collections affect print book acquisition are now all matters that can be discussed from experience. Andrew Albanese, reporting for Library Journal Academic Newswire, wrote an interesting summary of this side of Charleston: http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6501604.html?nid=2673#news4
While e-books are now plainly a technology of today, a fascinating look at tomorrow came up in sessions about the problems of authority in online and networked scholarly communications. Michael Jensen’s concept of “Authority 3.0” , how the measure of scholarly authority may be computed in the future, was at the base of sessions titled “Authoritative? What’s That? And Who Says?” and “Who Shall Review the Reviewer?” In the former, Laura Cohen, Web Support Librarian at the University at Albany, and Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer for Ingenta, took a close look at how traditional processes of peer review and new forms of user-generated content and approval might be adapted to each other. (See http://del.icio.us/ldodds/charleston-2007-11 for background reading to Dodds’ talk, and http://www.slideshare.net/lcohen/the-promise-of-authority-in-social-scholarship/ for Cohen’s presentation slides.)
Dodds was joined by Geoffrey Bilder, Director of Strategic Initiatives at CrossRef, for the latter session, where they proposed several ideas for laying the foundations of an “Authority 3.0” version of scholarly communications. Bilder labeled one such idea an “author DOI.” Like the DOI (digital object identifiers) that can permanently track a chunk of content (be it book, article, chapter, graph, etc.), a similar author ID would trace an individual scholar across all of his or her work—be it as a primary author of a text, a peer reviewer, or an authoritative commenter. Dodds presented the concept of an overlay “kitemark” to track “Versions of Record” in a world where digital pre-print, post-print, revised, copied, and re-published versions abound. The kitemark (named for the UK’s British Standards Institution certification schemes for indicating quality and adherence to standards) could contain metadata ranging from what type of peer review an article underwent, to whether any citations in the article have been retracted or revised. (For more information of the Author ID project, see http://www.crossref.org/CrossTech/2007/02/crossref_author_id_meeting.html.)
A striking aspect of the Charleston Conference was the relatively small number of university press representatives attending and presenting. While university presses, particularly those with journals programs, were a noticeable and successful presence at the pre-conference vendors showcase, the majority of presenting (and thus conversation-defining) publishers came from the commercial sector. There is plainly room for more active non-profit and university press participation—issues that the AAUP community deals with on a daily basis are of central interest to the many other librarian and vendor attendees.
While the Charleston Conference may be losing its identity as an intimate gathering of colleagues, it remains one of the best magnets for knowledgeable people who care about working through the problems facing scholarly communications. The 2008 Conference will be held November 5-8, so there is plenty of time for the AAUP community to plan to attend and even get involved. Despite Charleston’s growth, the conference directors maintain an open welcome for suggestions for session topics and panelists. Go to http://www.katina.info/conference/ for more information about contacting the conference organizers and complete 2007 program details
Posted by: site admin @ 11:38 am
A Report from Digital Publishing Forums
by Brenna McLaughlin
Unbound: Advancing Book Publishing in a Digital World
What felt at times like a motivational fête for the publishing industry was hosted by Google this January in one of America’s temples to book culture, the New York Public Library. Publishers were addressed by web-savvy authors and gurus such as Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) and Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing) as well as innovative publishers such as Tim O’Reilly and Michael Holdsworth (formerly of Cambridge University Press).
One of the ideas that recurred throughout the day was that trade and scholarly/professional publishing are perhaps two different businesses—”entertainment vs. information —that would diverge even further in the digital world. Interestingly, the authors who presented were mostly trade (fiction and nonfiction) writers, whereas most publishers presented from the scholarly, professional, and education sectors.
The authors provided fascinating case studies of how they and their publishers had put the web and networked communities to work for their books. Several of the authors admitted that they had little concern for any sales revenue that might be lost by free online dissemination of their published book. The speaking and consulting fees they can command are only going to be enhanced by a higher public profile. Several publishers presented valuable details on how large-scale digitization projects and business models, rather than individualized web-based marketing plans, had enhanced sales.
HarperCollins Senior Vice President Carolyn Pittis spoke about their “Digital Warehouse,” whose functions are conceived as comparable to a bricks-and-mortar warehouse: the storage, management, and distribution of content. On top of their digital warehouse, HarperCollins has developed its own “Search Inside” functionality and recently introduced a widget for syndicating searchable book content to users’ web sites. Holdsworth provided a glimpse of how improvements to digital channels—from print-on-demand (POD) programs to Google Book Search—have increased sales of what Cambridge University Press had once called the “Comet’s Tail,” the books that sell less than 50 copies a year. One eye-catching statistic involved more than 1000 POD-available titles that sold not a single copy in 2005, but represented more than $1 million in sales in 2006—sales that would have been lost if those titles had gone out of print in the interim.
Most presenters seemed to agree that giving some kind of content away for free was a no-brainer for selling more content in various formats. What that meant to different folks—be it entire digital copies of a book under loose Creative Commons licenses, free sample chapters, free audio downloads or other ‘extras,’ or free search accessibility and text browsing—was not explicitly debated. The underlying consensus was, unsurprisingly, that publishers by this point need to be digitizing their content and should be able to control that content, but that indexing and search should be widely available through not just Google and Amazon, but through other search engines, libraries, and so on.
Google produced a short video of highlights from the event, which you can view here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsCkAeZaxi8
STM Book 2.01: The e-Book Journey: Current Paths and Future Roads
The STM (International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers) e-book seminar was billed as appropriate for any segment of scholarly publishing—including the humanities and social sciences. The day provided a thorough overview of where e-books now stand in the publishing industry, and the road ahead as perceived by both publishers and librarians.
To get us to today’s leading edge of electronic book publishing, James Gray of the Ingram Digital Group spoke about the massive advances in print-on-demand (POD) technologies and applications by traditional and non-traditional publishers. As well, he indicated the experiments that Lightening Source has been undertaking in producing books in a wide array of POD formats such as large print and other language editions. Such advances in POD capability continue to transform the book production and distribution systems. Michael Holdsworth presented here, as well, focusing on the role that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft LiveSearch may play in the e-book market.
Preparing the book production workflow to take greatest advantage of new technologies and content channels was addressed by Helen Bailey, VP & Pub Director for Content Management at John Wiley & Sons. Bailey spoke about how Wiley has transformed their workflow to create XML digital content that can serve the many new (and potential future) publishing and distribution channels. While post-press XML coding had the initial appeal of speed, Bailey saw that in the long run it would not serve their business needs. From a print-focused process, Wiley is now moving steadily to a digital-first workflow.
By far some of the most interesting information presented was market research on how libraries use and what they want from e-books. Elsevier (Science Direct) shared data from their pilot e-book project, which experimented with various subscription and sales models. A science librarian, while recognizing that a print book would always be needed for the library’s core collection, looked forward to a day when they would be able to collect e-books broadly. From his perspective, this would be feasible when publishers made e-book versions available with no time lag, with greater functionality (more than just a copy of the print book), with flexibility of use, and when e-books can be integrated into the catalogue (through MARC records).
Linda Bennett, of Gold Leaf Consulting, had earlier confirmed many of these recommendations. Bennett recently conducted a survey of librarians on use of e-books and opinions of publishers’ business models. Some of the problems that librarians see with current e-book options are rigid usage restrictions, the wide variety of platforms, the lack of MARC records, lack of searchability, and price. After reviewing several publishers’ e-book models, Bennett noted that librarians were split on preferred models themselves. Fifty percent of surveyed librarians preferred to directly purchase content, and fifty percent preferred a license arrangement. An AAUP member got top marks in that survey—the librarians interviewed appreciated the Oxford Scholarship Online model, and, perhaps just as importantly, recognized the brand with approval.
For more detailed information, several presentations from this seminar are available online: http://www.stm-assoc.org/presentations/2007-presentations-book-201london/
As another useful reference on this topic, Springer has publicly released a study of their e-books’ usage in libraries: http://www.springer.com/ebooks
Digital Asset Distribution for Book Publishers: An Emerging Infrastructure
One of the newest acronyms in electronic publishing is DAD, for digital asset distribution—a new name for the electronic storage and distribution infrastructure that’s been developing in the industry over recent years. Klopotek brought together presenters from a number of DADs, including codeMantra, BiblioVault, Value Chain, HarperCollins, and Ingram Digital Ventures, to give publishers a crash course on DAD.
Each DAD representative took 15 minutes to present their services and opinions about what publishers could and should expect from a digital asset distribution partner. The vendors ranged from LibreDigital, a book-focused division of NewsStand, which manages electronic newspaper content for media companies around the globe; HarperCollins, which is now offering their digital warehousing services (described at the Books Unbound seminar, see above) to other publishers; to the familiar nonprofit BiblioVault, which is evolving into a full-service DAD.
Many presenters also had general advice for publishers, regardless of what service provider one might choose. Kate Davies of BiblioVault reminded the audience that working with a DAD can’t mean walking away from digital content distribution tasks entirely—strategic publishing decisions remain with the publisher. Choosing a vendor you can build a relationship with is vital. LibreDigital’s Craig Miller’s mantra was “convert once, publish many”—publishers should aim for a solution which ensures that content need be digitized only once for all of the many new content distribution channels available.
The day was extremely informative, presenting a wide array of options to consider as publishers search for the right—scalable, flexible yet stable—infrastructure for new electronic publishing models. Most usefully, however, the presentations from each DAD are now freely available online for publishers’ review. A white paper on the topic, prepared by Kloptek for Mike Shatzkin of Idea Logical and Mark Bide of Rightscom is also available for purchase.
Presentations and white paper are available here: http://www.klopotek.de/en52235.htm
Posted by: site admin @ 8:50 am
Since 1965, the AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show has honored the design and production teams who further a long tradition of excellence in book design, and—through the traveling exhibition and catalog—has visually taught the tenets of good design. Of the 293 books, 335 jackets and covers, and 6 journals that were entered, the 2007 jurors chose 51 books, 32 jackets/covers, and 2 journals as the very best examples of university press design.
The 2007 jury included Linda Gustafson, principal, Counterpunch Book Design; Patricia Curtan, Graphic Designer/Illustrator; John Gall, Vice President & Art Director, Vintage/Anchor Books; and Cameron Poulter, former Design & Production Manager, University of Chicago Press. Lynn Werts, University Press of Florida, chaired the 2007 Design and Production Committee.
Complete details on selected titles, as well as information about the designers and companies who donated time, paper, and printing to the 2007 Show, can be found at http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/marketing/designshow/winners2007.html.
Minneapolis, MN
The 2007 AAUP Annual Meeting was a great success, bringing approximately 600 scholarly communications professionals together in the Twin Cities. While the cocktail parties are long over, the knowledge-sharing that the annual meeting is known for continues.
* Talks, session notes, and presentations are available through the AAUPWiki: http://aaupwiki.princeton.edu/
* The inaugural presidential address by Sanford Thatcher, Director of the Penn State University Press and 2007-08 AAUP President is online: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/annualmeeting/2007/pres.html
* A list of volunteer mentoring contacts was compiled by Laura Westlund (Managing Editor, University of Minnesota Press) and distributed at the Newcomers’ Reception. The list can be accessed by members: http://www.aaupnet.org/members/mentor07.html
NOTE: this is a members-only resource. A member ID and password is needed to access this. Members may request login information here: http://aaupnet.org/pwrequest.html
* MP3 recordings of almost all sessions are also available for purchase: http://www.conferencemedia.net/
Posted by: site admin @ 4:01 pm
A New Form of Good, Old-Fashioned, Word-of-Mouth Publicity
by Colleen Lanick
Publicity Manager, MIT Press
Since September 2001, the focus of the media and public on matters of lifestyle, personal finance, and entertainment has clearly broadened to include more substantive questions of war, peace, culture, religion, security, and the role of the United States on the world stage. It has been widely recognized that in such an environment, scholarly books are more welcome than ever. This message has not been lost on trade publishers, who in the years since 9/11 have strikingly beefed up their lists. One consequence of this otherwise positive change of focus is that it has once again become difficult for scholarly presses to compete for their share of media attention. Yet the books we publish remain highly relevant, offering depth and perspective on matters of both topical and transcendent interest.
The challenge for marketing departments, many with shrinking budgets, is to figure out how to get the word out about our titles and authors. As more and more people are getting their news and information on the internet and as the blogosphere is taking on an increasingly important role as a setting for public discourse, the most logical (and economical) way to do this might just be through the blog. At MIT, we’ve long been tracking the hits of our titles on some of a wide variety of blogs, finding that they are really paying attention to our titles and engaging in lively discussions about our books. It just seemed logical to for us to start our own blog. Over the past few months, Oxford University Press, the MIT Press, Yale University Press, and the University of Chicago Press have all launched blogs as a way to post information about authors and titles and place university press books, journals, and authors in the context of the news of the day.
Blogs are relatively easy to set up. Oxford, Yale, and MIT are currently using Typepad, a blog service that provides hosting and pre-designed templates for a nominal fee, allowing a blogger to get up and running in minutes. Presses with more IT infrastructure can design their own sites by running blogging software on their own server, as Chicago is doing. They are using software called Movable Type and hosting the blog on their own server. “We have a server that is just running blogs. We wanted to have the capability to run multiple blogs, to track traffic, and we wanted to keep our content secure,” said Dean Blobaum, Electronic Marketing Manager, Books Division, University of Chicago Press.
And the content really seems to come naturally—it’s often surprisingly easy to find links to books and authors to post comments on every day (or thereabouts). “From a promotions and publicity standpoint, we couldn’t have started a blog soon enough.” said Daniel Lee, Internet Marketing Manager at Yale. “It allows us to reinforce frontlist titles that we’re really trying to push as well as shed some much wanted light on backlist items that ordinarily wouldn’t get any attention.” At MIT, we are experimenting with all sorts of content on our blog. We are using the blog to increase the momentum of media and review coverage we receive for our titles, to highlight upcoming events and exhibits relevant to our titles, to feature excerpts from our titles, and to post interviews with and original content by our authors about current issues. We’re also experimenting with a podcasting feature, which will allow us to post readings by our authors and Q&As and debates about our titles. Instead of waiting for reporters to find our titles or discover our authors as experts on a particular topic, we can help them along by providing the groundwork for a discussion of how what MIT Press publishes relates to the world around us. Our hope is that this will increase the visibility of our titles and promote discussion of the important topics and issues we publish.
A Boston-area political blog praised the MIT PressLog as a “wonderful nerdy-arty mix… there’s one part art and design; one part technology and techno-cultural theoretical work; and one part politics.” The post went on to discuss a post we had done about one of our backlist titles. This is exactly what we are hoping our blog will do. “It’s a chance for us to make connections between MIT Press books and stories in the news,” according to MIT Press Marketing Director Gita Manaktala. “These connections are real and illuminating, but in the past, we would have had to wait for reporters, reviewers, or editorial writers to make them.” Matthew Sollars, Product Manager at Oxford University Press, sees their blog as a unique opportunity to provide content that isn’t out there already. “It’s what will really differentiate us from the other content that’s available on the web,” he said. Oxford has been posting original content by their authors about hot news topics, conducting Q&As with their authors, and will be hosting live chats and debates surrounding their titles. Sollars said he plans to host a debate on the blog this summer with Saul Cornell about his forthcoming book about gun control. He hopes to get a dialogue going with both pro- and anti-gun-control writers and bloggers.
Chicago is doing something a bit different with their blog. Previously, they had been creating electronic press releases and pulling quotes from reviews for their titles on their web site but now will be posting both on their blog According to Blobaum, some of this is just handling content more effectively as the blog categorizes and archives itself, which will hopefully garner more search engine hits. “But of course we also want to create some original and interesting posts that tie the news to our book, that highlight what our authors are doing, and probably we’ll have the occasional author essay/op-ed piece,” Blobaum says of The Chicago Blog. “We hope that bloggers (and maybe some print journalists) will visit our blog or subscribe to the RSS or Atom Feed and find something useful or interesting from time to time.”
Overall, there seems to be enthusiasm throughout each press for the blog—in marketing, sales, and editorial. In addition to traditional publicity and marketing related news posts, editors can comment on trends in their specific fields and we’ve found that many of our authors are more than happy to jump on board to provide original content for their books. The blog can help to keep everyone at the press involved in the books long after their publication and it is the perfect solution for authors who want to actively participate in the marketing of their book. One of the challenges is that our lists are so diverse—many readers are only interested in just one portion of our list. Sollars mentioned that RSS feeds should be able to help readers focus on information they are most interested in and weed out what they’re not. (For a more detailed discussion of RSS feeds, please see “RSS: The Next Big Thing?” in the Fall 2005 Exchange)
“It only takes one good link to drive sales up markedly. It’s hard not to take advantage of a tool like this. It’s free promotion on the fly. Just having our book titles pop up more in search engines, other people’s blogs, news articles, etc., generates a lot more excitement about what we are doing,” Lee said of the Yale blog. Of course, the blog does not replace other marketing and publicity efforts, but it really is an exciting and versatile new tool that can allow us to reinforce what we are already doing, think about our titles in a creative way, provide original and innovative content to drive readers to our books, and introduce people to titles—that they might not normally have had exposure to—in a lively and engaging way.
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2006 Exchange.
At the 2006 Annual Meeting
by Brenna McLaughlin
Communications Manager, AAUP
The French Quarter looks almost untouched. Bars, restaurants, galleries, and shops are open; there are none of the tell-tale high-water marks that scar much of the rest of New Orleans. Some shops are shuttered, there are some signs promising that this or that local favorite will re-open soon. There is one major difference, though, in the French Quarter since Katrina—the people. There just aren’t that many of them. Certainly, there were tourists, residents, and workers about in mid-June, but by numerous degrees fewer than years past. The Quarter seems oddly quiet (excepting the almost desperate boisterousness of Bourbon Street)—more like a shore town in the off season than the bustling year-round convention city that New Orleans had become. The city, home to close to half a million people before Katrina, is now estimated at a population of around 200,000.
The business-as-usual veneer on New Orleans’ tourism center is almost enough to fool some first-time visitors who haven’t yet gotten a glimpse of the city beyond the Quarter into thinking that NOLA residents and officials are exaggerating the extent of the damage, underselling the extent of the recovery. As I waited for a table at Café Du Monde, for the de rigueur café au lait and beignets, two of these visitors stood behind me. Unhappy at the unexpected delay, one groused, “And they say New Orleans is still struggling.” “Doesn’t look that way to me,” the other agreed. To give them the benefit of the doubt, they may have arrived seconds too late to see why we were queuing. A large party, maybe 30 or more, had crowded in just before me. Not tourists—they wore t-shirts indicating a Presbyterian volunteer group and looked to be taking a deserved break from helping New Orleans in its, yes, continuing struggle to recover from the natural and man-made disasters of 2005.
Location is always an important part of the experience of an AAUP Annual Meeting, and it was, plainly, an extraordinary factor in 2006. When the meeting was originally scheduled to be held in New Orleans, reactions varied from chagrin over the summer bayou heat to reminisces of freewheeling New Orleans conventions past. After Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and destroyed the New Orleans that we had known and expected to visit, the board and program committee’s reaction was unanimous: if the hotel was in a condition to host AAUP 2006, we would be there.
Attendance numbers at the meeting were surprisingly unaffected by the decision to stay in New Orleans, although on an individual level it was often a major factor. Some, worried about the city’s strained services, decided to stay home this year; others made coming an unusual priority. And for those who came, the meeting’s mood was uncharacteristically subdued—despite reported excitement about the program and appreciation of the good food and good service that the city is still proud to provide. New Orleans’ reality was inescapable.
At the opening banquet, Jim Amoss, editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, shared his truly gripping story of the daily newspaper’s experience in reporting their city’s disaster. In addition to the recognition its breaking news reporting received, the Times-Picayune rightfully won a Pulitzer service award for its efforts to get news to city residents stranded without access to basic information about what was happening. A tiny detail, mentioned in passing as Amoss concluded his presentation, threw the massive scale of this civic disaster into sharp relief. His home phone service had been restored only the week before—more than nine months after the hurricane.
A small group of AAUP attendees were able to gain a more immediate sense of the disaster’s scope and the significant human and cultural loss. Generously organized and led by Michael Mizell-Nelson, Assistant Professor of History at the University of New Orleans and content coordinator for the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, and Greta Gladney, a graduate student in the UNO history department, 4th-generation New Orleans resident, and post-Katrina activist, a small tour was driven through some of the most devastated neighborhoods in the city, including the Lower Ninth Ward. Scott McLemee, a writer for Inside Higher Ed who took part, later reported in his column, “It was overwhelming—too much to take in.” Another participant posted a shaky video from the trip on YouTube, and even at this distant remove, McLemee’s words ring true.
I was able to take a bus trip run by one of New Orleans’ commercial tour companies; these are not yet permitted through the Lower Ninth Ward. Other areas of the city were equally, if differently, shocking. Neighborhoods such as Gentilly (which experienced the second highest death rate) and Lakeview show at first glance not the utter ruin of the Ninth Ward, but an eerie ghost-town appearance of normality. I found myself looking out to miles of still-standing densely-built low-rise residential blocks. They look, at a glance, just like the city neighborhoods a conference-goer such as myself would have no reason to ever visit, the neighborhoods where many of us live in cities across the country—where people live, work, pack their bags for travel, and expect to come home to.
Focusing my eyes on these streets, though, and looking closely at the houses, I saw the high-water marks, the evidence of rot, the empty windows, and, most frighteningly, the spray-paint markers of search-and-rescue teams. Few people are yet living in these homes, few working from them, and there are too many reminders of those who found they’d packed their bags for good in August 2005.
The tour bus driver, who was also the guide (the company no longer had enough staff to cover absences even with the minimal tour schedule presently running), quietly personalized the trip, pointing out along the way the home which he is slowly rebuilding, the house where he had grown up, the neighborhoods where family and friends no longer live. It was a shocked and sobered assortment of strangers—from California and Tennessee, from Florida and New York—whom he then asked to write a letter to our senators and representatives, to turn a trip of mourning into a kind of mission for recovery.
It is, in the end, a small gesture: to support, with what financial might we can muster, the city’s brutalized tourism and convention economy, and to bear witness back to our own home regions of the conditions our fellow citizens are still living under. But the small gesture of one individual or organization can have real effect when multiplied by all of us—by 600 scholarly publishing representatives, by the 17,000 librarians who came to New Orleans the following week, by 30 Presbyterian volunteers, and even by two impatient, perhaps just not-yet-caffeinated, café patrons.