Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Organizers of the last session on the last day of the 2010 Annual Meeting, “New Emerging Business Models in Journal Publishing,” joked about the difficulty of rounding up a crowd to talk about journals in such a time slot. However, a good number of dedicated attendees put off their final happy hour and heard presentations on some of the innovative approaches their colleagues are taking in journals publishing. One of those innovations is coming out of Amsterdam University Press, where they are extending a commitment to open access to journals. Business Director Martin Voigt shared with the audience how working with partners has made this a feasible model.
An international member of AAUP, Amsterdam University Press (AUP), does not have a formal journals program: its journals are currently managed by the press’s editors. Five of their journals (one forthcoming) are open access, a continuation of the AUP’s commitment to exploring feasible models for open access monographs through the OAPEN program. The press decided to explore the possibility of open access journals for a variety of reasons. In addition to the desire to make scholarly work accessible, they feel it may be an answer to the serials crisis in journals, which has been slowing the development of new journals and has led to a shrinking audience. The obstacle in the way of this ideal was, of course, funding.
While many presses would like to make their content more accessible, all are aware of the costs required to develop and maintain a journal. AUP’s solution to this problem was to work with partners – libraries, faculties, institutes– to create a “financial basis” for any new journal. Working with scholarly partners ensures the quality of the content, as representatives from all of the partners constitute the journal’s advisory board. Collaboration makes sense for the partners, as they all have a vested interest in the field and the existence of a journal for publishing in that field. The partners also benefit by working together, rather than in competition, with similarly focused organizations. Involving a wide swath of a particular scholarly community also has the very practical benefit of decreasing the contribution for each partner. The cost of supporting the open access journal replaces the subscription fee (and is often less) that these institutions would pay in a traditional model.
As a case study of how this model plays out, Voigt presented on the Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries (JALC). The journal came about when two archaeological institutions approached AUP and asked the press to calculate the costs of an open access journal covering archaeology in Holland and Belgium. After calculating costs, the press collaborated with the original two institutions to find an additional seven partners with interest in the field.
The press has developed a precise calculation of the required yearly costs for the operation of an open access journal. In the case of JALC, assuming a publishing frequency of one article per month, a part-time journal editor, IT development, and overhead, costs total €18,000. This cost is split evenly between the nine partners, leaving each responsible for €2,000 per year in addition to “their investment in time for acquisition, peer reviewing & editorial board.” This formula has been particularly successful for AUP because there is no risk involved – all costs have been anticipated and paid for by the funding partners. In fact, this model has also allowed the press to make a small profit, through subscription-based print-on-demand articles. Print subscriptions are available for € 99,95 a year, for which the subscriber receives two issues, each containing the previous six articles. Voigt reported that as of June, they had a steady 45 subscriptions, surely not a huge number, but an admirable bonus for an already self-sustaining project.
The benefits of publishing JALC online extend beyond the increased access it offers. While “enhanced publication” may sound like a suspect catchphrase to some, AUP, with the advice of its partners, has found ways to take advantage of the additional capabilities of digital in ways that are valuable to scholars. The online format allows the journal to publish the research data along with the articles themselves. Voigt shared an example of how they have been able to integrate technology particularly useful to archaeologists: he showed an image from an excavation of a burial, and subsequent slides displayed the added views provided by an online Geographical Information System (GIS), viewing the image as an X-ray and separating the objects.
When asked by an audience member whether the partners funding model has made publishing decisions political, Voigt said they had not run into problems of that nature. This is certainly a question that would need to be addressed by any press considering a similar model, taking into account the different types of potential partners with different sets of interests. University presses, however, are no strangers to the complexities of partnering with various institutions, something that they are engaging in more and more frequently. Amsterdam’s initiative of collaboration may prove to be a model for the successful merging of open access and sustainability.
View the presentation slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/aaupny/aup-new-emerging-business-models-in-journal-publishing-voigt
Brenna McLaughlin
Electronic and Strategic Initiatives Director, AAUP
Much like e-catalogs, electronic galleys and review copies have been one of the great promises of electronic publishing. Printing and shipping review and exam copies can represent a large cost in a small marketing budget—even more when reaching an international market. But like most e-promises, digital galleys have taken a hard road to fulfillment, caught between the tricky questions of file security and the stubborn reality of reviewers’ habits.
In 2008, NetGalley, a subsidiary of Firebrand Technologies, was launched to help smooth this road, providing a digital galley platform that would serve the interests of both professional readers and publishers. NetGalley offers speedy transmission of secure, searchable, full-color digital galleys and multi-media press kits as well as options to read galleys on desktops or e-readers such as Kindle and Nook. Publishers can also view real-time reporting on who is reading a title. The applicability of such a service beyond pre-publication review was quickly obvious, particularly in the areas of course adoption and international rights sales.
This June, AAUP was pleased to announce a new discount program for our members, offered in partnership with NetGalley, for their innovative e-galley service. All AAUP members are now eligible for a 10% discount off of the monthly subscription rate, regardless of their level of participation. NetGalley allows publishers to share galleys and digital press kits with their own reader contacts, as well as with new communities of professional readers through the NetGalley reader membership. Professional readers can register and use the site for free.
AAUP member Island Press has been using the NetGalley services since early 2009, attracted by both the economic and environmental savings that might be realized through e-galleys. Jaime Jennings, publicity manager at Island, shared some insight into their experiences. The Press never has more than 20 new trade (or trade-crossover with professional and academic markets) titles offered in NetGalley. If a title has significant course adoption potential, they will keep it in the system for a longer time.
For course adoption, as with traditional reviewers, Jennings reports that there are some hurdles to surmount with readers. Some professors balk at downloading the Adobe Digital Editions software, and many readers simply still prefer the hard copy. Island is using a number of strategies to work through this reluctance, primarily by pushing the digital galley as an initial step in the review decision. A professor might be pleased to view a pre-publication digital galley and make a more informed request for a print exam copy down the line. For review outlets, Island has found that more are now willing to use the digital galley to the point of deciding whether to assign the title for review and only at that stage requesting a hard copy be sent. Online reviewers, Jennings notes, have been naturally more accepting of the files.
Jennings stresses that the Press has needed to be open to experimenting with the platform and NetGalley features to make the most of the service. Island has found the widget feature—the widget can be copied directly into emails for publishers to invite their contacts to view a title—to be easy to use and of increasing value. They have recently worked closely with the NetGalley team on a title with a complicated 4-color layout and a significant international market—where a print galley would have been ruinously expensive to produce and ship.
There have been unexpected rewards as well. Jennings has listed all Island titles in the “public” NetGalley catalog, so they are discoverable by all readers who have registered with the service. (All requests for digital galleys are sent to the Press for approval.) For a small press, Jennings says, this has been a boon in reaching new audiences, particularly booksellers and small academic and public library buyers who might not have been on the Press’s sales radar before this. Jennings is always looking at which file restrictions, additional marketing material, or title profile will make the most of the service—tweaking and experimenting along the way.
AAUP-NetGalley Discount Program: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/epub/netgalley.html
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
The buzz for the 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting began long before the meeting touched down in Salt Lake City, as the diverse and varied program made its way online and the Program Committee’s Facebook page developed an active following. The meeting itself more than lived up to the anticipation, with almost 530 individuals in attendance for a packed agenda of panels, speakers, workshops, and real life social networking.
Three pre-meeting workshops got the meeting off to a bustling start, with close to 150 attendees in total. “E-Book Publishing in a Nutshell,” organized by Alan Harvey (Stanford University Press), addressed issues in e-book publishing from manuscript to customer access and featured presenters who outlined processes in action at their presses. Presenters at “Not Your Father’s Marketing: New Strategies in the Digital Age,” organized by Colleen Lanick (MIT Press), shared how they have adapted their current marketing strategies to keep up with today’s readers, wherever they may be. The Financial Officers Meeting found success in coordinating its schedule with the Annual Meeting this year, with 34 participants discussing the issues they are facing at their home presses.
On Thursday, attendees also had the opportunity to take a trip to the J. Willard Marriot Library at the University of Utah, where they were treated to a tour which spanned book history: beginning with clay tablets and rare books and concluding with a demonstration of a book printed in five minutes on the Espresso Book Machine. In between, attendees also received a tour of the Book Arts Studio, made their own “zine” on the history of book printing, created a letterpress bookmark, and viewed the American Institute of Graphic Artists 50 Books/50 Covers exhibit.
Attendees gathered that night for the Opening Banquet, where they were welcomed by Executive Director Peter Givler. The 2010 AAUP Constituency Award was presented in memoriam to Will Powers, who served for 11 years as the design and production manager at the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Presented by Betsy Litz, the award was accepted by Pamela McClanahan, director of the Minnesota Historical Society Press, on behalf of his wife, Cheryl Miller.
The Opening Banquet also featured a memorable keynote speech by William Germano, Dean and Professor of English Literature at The Cooper Union, and scholarly publishing veteran. Exploring the theme, “What Are Books Good For?” he took his listeners through the history of books, beginning with “scholarly work before the term was invented,” and traced four stages, characterized by the relationship between data and narrative. In conclusion he said, “We are the case for books.”
At the Friday luncheon, Kathleen Keane, 2009-2010 AAUP President gave her farewell address to the membership in which she acknowledged the challenges presses have faced in the past year, while looking optimistically to the future. The following afternoon, Richard Brown assumed the presidency, leaving the audience with a message of “not naïve optimism, but hope,” in his inaugural address.
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.
The 2011 AAUP Annual Meeting will be held June 2-5 in Baltimore at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. There is already a new buzz building for the 2011 meeting, and AAUP Annual Meeting Program Committee Chair Gita Manaktala (Editorial Director, MIT Press) is collecting ideas for session topics and speakers. We hope to see you there!
Darrin Pratt
Director, University Press of Colorado
During my first year working in university press publishing (1991), I attended a Midwest Presses meeting hosted by my employer, Indiana University Press. Little did I know that this opportunity would not be repeated as often as I would have liked. I did not show my face at another AAUP meeting until Western Presses in 1998 in Berkeley, and I have had only infrequent opportunities to network with and learn from my colleagues at other presses since then.
Nevertheless, every AAUP conference I have attended has been extremely valuable, because of the lessons learned, the connections made, and the reminder that the difficult issues we face we do not face alone. Because I’ve always garnered much from these gatherings, I would like to send someone from my staff every year. Unfortunately, I have only been able to do so twice since 2000, both times sending our marketing manager. Justifying the cost of this fantastic resource is difficult for a press with limited resources.
So I was excited to hear that the annual meeting was going to be held in Salt Lake City, only an eight-hour drive from the Denver area. That may sound like a long trip to you folks from the East Coast, Midwest, or South, but when you live in a big Western state, any other major conference-hosting city is often at least that far away. Here was an opportunity to take my entire staff at a reasonable cost (because who knows when we might next afford the trip for just one), if, of course, I could convince everyone to spend hours together in a car and to share hotel rooms. Fortunately, the five of us get along well, so the prospect was only moderately horrifying and my staff was amenable to the plan.
Happily, the trip was well worth our time and efforts. My hat is off to the program committee for concocting one of the most energized and practical programs for dealing with the changing landscape of publishing, one that focused on moving us forward instead of looking back at what we (think we) have lost. For those of us at Colorado, this was the perfect opportunity to contextualize our efforts to adjust to the changes wrought by our increasingly digital world—and to get some great ideas from our many peers creatively addressing the same issues.
One big problem with working in publishing out West is that, as noted above, you’re a long way from anywhere most of the time. Presses like Colorado don’t get many opportunities to talk shop with other like-minded scholarly publishers in a face to face setting. You can start to feel isolated and unsure of the path you are taking, particularly in the turbulent publishing climate we all face today. So hearing what others were doing with respect to e-book sales and delivery, XML workflow and conversion, and the like was both reassuring (none of us have all the answers just yet) and stimulating (there’s more than one way to skin a digital cat).
As it turns out, the trip was not without incident—one of our cars broke down on the drive westward. Even so, we all are glad to have had the opportunity to attend this meeting and hope to have many more opportunities to do so again. Speaking on behalf of everyone at Colorado, we’re ready for our next road trip!
On June 19, 2010, Georgetown University Press Director Richard Brown assumed leadership of AAUP. Brown will serve a one-year term, and succeeds Kathleen Keane, director of Johns Hopkins University Press, who remains on the association’s Board of Directors.
Brown began his work in publishing as an editor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia, a research institute studying international affairs and the presidency. He then spent nine years in religion publishing, first as an editor at Pilgrim Press and then as director of Westminster John Knox Press. In 2001, he began his tenure as director of Georgetown University Press. The Press was founded in 1964, and has been a member of AAUP since 1986. Under Brown’s leadership, the Press has strengthened its reputation in its core subject areas, including languages and linguistics, international affairs, and public policy.
Brown comes to the association’s presidency with an already significant history of service to AAUP, having chaired the AAUP Annual Meeting Program Committee in 2006, and the Task Force on Committees in 2009. He has been a member of the Board of Directors since 2007, serving last year as President-Elect.
His distinguished academic achievements include a PhD in religious studies from the University of Virginia, an MA in theological studies from Emory University; an MBA from the University of Louisville; and an AB in English, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
In his inaugural address on June 19 at the 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Brown urged listeners to think about scholarly publishing as in “a perpetual state of transition,” rather than the “crisis” it is so often made out to be. He proposed that publishers think of themselves as engaged in a “moral activity,” and to that end, that all member presses should confront three “orientations” within their organizations: economic, social, and cultural. He concluded with the conviction that the collective talent of the scholarly publishing community, along with the inherent significance and necessity of the enterprise, is reason for “not naïve optimism, but hope.”
AAUP posthumously awarded the 2010 AAUP Constituency Award to Will Powers, for 11 years the design and production manager at the Minnesota Historical Society Press (MHSP). The award was established in 1991 to honor staff at member presses who have demonstrated active leadership and service to the association and the university press community.
The award was announced on June 17 at the 2010 AAUP Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City. Betsy Litz, Production Manager at Princeton University Press, introduced the award, describing Powers as “embody[ing] everything that is so wonderful about the AAUP.” The award was accepted by Pamela McClanahan, director of the MHSP, on behalf of his wife, Cheryl Miller.
Among Powers’ numerous accomplishments while at the MHS Press, five of the projects he worked on were honored by the annual AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show. He began his career in publishing as a typesetter at Stinehour Press in Vermont. He went on to establish his own fine press, Amaranth Press, in San Francisco, while also doing editorial work for the University of California Press and North Point Press. Moving to Minneapolis in 1988, he worked briefly for an advertising agency, and returned to book design with Stanton Publishing Services (BookMobile) before assuming his role at MHSP.
Over the years, Powers served the AAUP community in a variety of ways, with a remarkable generosity of spirit. Colleagues remember his willingness to share advice and information with others on the AAUP email lists, and to mentor students, interns, and young colleagues. He moderated and participated in numerous panels at the production managers and annual meetings. At the 2004 Annual Meeting, he distributed a chapbook he had developed, New Types for New Books: What We Have; What We Need, which subsequently went into three printings. He was a member of the Design & Production Committee in 2007, and served as its chair in 2008.
Powers passed away on August 25, 2009. Together, the Minnesota Historical Society Press and his wife Cheryl Miller compiled a chapbook celebrating his life and work, A Tribute to Will Powers, where colleagues, family, and friends shared memories and photographs.
On July 27, AAUP and the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Center (SPARC) co-sponsored a webcast entitled “Innovation, the future of e-books, and the Archaeology of the Americas Digital Monograph Initiative.” Hosted by SPARC’s Jennifer McLennan, the webcast featured a presentation by Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado, which explored the Mellon-funded initiative, how the AADMI had evolved from the original proposal, and what the participants were learning. The initiative partners have shifted their goal from technical innovation to business innovation, and see promise that their results will be scalable beyond the original presses, and perhaps beyond the original discipline as well.
With close to 100 participants from both the publishing and library communities, the presentation was followed by a question and answer session. Asked how the initiative would remain sustainable beyond the duration of the grant, Pratt answered that the most important factor would be partnerships in every phase. Thus far, the presses’ partnership has been a rewarding experience for all involved. Despite all of the presses publishing in the same field, Pratt has found that competition has not been a problem. Instead, collaborating on such a forward-looking project has been energizing.
The 2010-2011 AAUP committees and their respective chairs have been announced and may be viewed on the AAUP site. New this year are the Eco Publishing and Library Relations Committees. The Book, Jacket, and Journal Show will now be handled by a separate committee, allowing the Design and Production Committee to focus on other issues, including digital workflow.
View the charges for the various committees and task forces in the members-only section of the website (password required).
On August 10, President Obama signed into law H.R. 2765, known as the SPEECH Act. Strongly supported by the publishing community and other First Amendment advocates, the act prohibits federal courts from recognizing or enforcing foreign libel judgments that do not pass First Amendment muster. The legislation also allows American authors and publishers to seek a declaration in court that such a foreign judgment is not enforceable in the U.S., and to do so even if no attempt has been made to enforce the foreign judgment.
Staff at AAUP member presses are encouraged to submit article proposals to the Exchange about initiatives at member presses, industry news or trends, and other topics of interest to the scholarly publishing community. Feature articles are typically 700-1300 words in length.
The copy deadline for the Fall 2010 issue of the Exchange will be Monday, November 1. Initial proposals should generally be submitted at least one month in advance of the copy deadline.
Proposals for the fall issue may be sent to Brenna McLaughlin at bmclaughlin@aaupnet.org.
Perpetual Motion: The Job of an Electronic Publishing Manager
Publishing Poetry at University Presses
TEI: Scholarly Publishers Collaborate on XML
Computers and Composition Digital Press: A Born-Digital Partnership
Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come
Miscellany
AAUP Web Seminar: XML Workflow Case Study
Books for Understanding News
Google Books Settlement Updates
Cornell Announces New Mellon-funded Collaboration
Ithaka Report: Faculty Survey 2009
Calendar: See the events calendar at www.aaupnet.org
Krista Coulson
Electronic Publishing Manager, University of Wisconsin Press
As university presses are increasingly integrating digital publishing into their programs, new staff needs have arisen. Some presses, like the University of Wisconsin Press, have addressed this by creating the position of Electronic Publishing Manager. As this is such a new role, and an ever-evolving one, AAUP thought it would be valuable for me to share my own experience as one example of what the role might entail. I should first say that the digital publishing job description at any particular press is going to vary considerably. There are no firm boundaries yet to the job duties. To an extent, each position description is crafted to fill the holes in the existing expertise at a press. While there may be some overlap in job responsibilities, there are just as likely to be differences. My position is in administration and reports to the press director, but similar positions at other presses are assigned to marketing or production departments.
The Press’s e-book program is out of its infancy, but still very young. We sell PDF-based e-books with most major institutional vendors and have, in the past year, begun selling to individual customers via Amazon’s Kindle store, Ingram Digital’s retail e-book program, and our own website. We are also in the process of adding additional vendors like Sony and Barnes and Noble.
Wisconsin’s Electronic Publishing Manager (EPM) position was created last February. Before that, I worked for the Press on an annual contract basis for two years. In the contract position, I assessed the scope and viability of an e-book program for the Press, evaluating the need for an EPM position and, it was hoped, giving the Press a better sense of the eventual scope of any such position. This ended up being an excellent exercise. For example, the Press’s initial attempt to create a job description included work related to establishing vendor contracts and e-book production, but severely underestimated the time and labor needed to evaluate and amend author contracts and book permissions, an oversight which was corrected in the final EPM description. I also requested position descriptions from Electronic Publishing Managers at other university presses, asking for their candid feedback on restrictive or unrealistic parts of the description. Lastly, the Press Director assessed the current expertise of the UW Press staff and customized the position to best help the Press. Since the long-time Rights Manager was retiring, the new EPM description includes significant contract review, permissions, and copyright oversight.
Broadly speaking, as the Electronic Publishing Manager, I am in charge of leading our digital publishing business—for both frontlist and backlist titles—while strategically planning for future innovation. On a day to day basis that takes many shapes. On any given day I may be doing work that falls into any of the Press’s departments.
Like acquisitions, I select titles that merit investment and/or seem likely to produce revenue. I answer author questions about e-book distribution and negotiate royalty rates. Mirroring the work of the production department, I manage conversion, ensure that we are working with the text used in the most recent printing, and implement appropriate author requests for changes. I track delivery of book files to vendors and assign EISBNs. I develop standards for, and do a final quality check on, new and unfamiliar formats like EPUB. As do rights managers, I review new author contracts and permissions statements to double-check that we are getting the necessary rights for electronic publication. I review and amend author contracts and update permissions to clear backlist titles for an e-book life. Like sales, I create and maintain relationships with e-book vendors—negotiating contracts, establishing discount rates, and seeking out promotion options. I assemble and send out metadata to our vendors. I enter price, EISBN, and format data into our website shopping cart system so we can sell e-books directly from our website. I work with publicity to encourage e-book press releases and special promotions and with our marketing manager to try to figure out how e-book marketing can be done most effectively. Lastly, I work with our business office to set up new accounting lines, pass on royalty information, and to track sales across widely divergent distribution streams.
I also manage special projects. For example, I work with our campus library’s digital collection and with the Google Books Partner project/Google Books Settlement (and author inquiries, objections, and confusion about both). I review tech and legal websites and blogs to stay current on emerging technology, sales trends, and copyright issues. While all of my colleagues find that their work is changing, the Electronic Publishing Manager is a position that is particularly in flux. Each industry update in metadata delivery, e-book format, electronic reading options, or newly registered lawsuit may mean reinventing workflow, or a change in my position description. Firebrand’s recent update to their metadata software meant that I had to entirely restructure the workflow for e-book production and deal with all the new problems that followed. The Google Books lawsuit has added massive contract review and author correspondence to my job.
One of the most difficult parts of my job is to integrate e-books into the regular workflow of Press. There are many parallel processes, where e-book workflow naturally mirrors print book workflow, while other tasks are entirely divergent. I have been working with acquisitions, marketing, and production to figure out how best to integrate e-books into their processes, and we seem to be constantly tweaking our procedures to account for changes outside of our press. Thinking about how all of these procedural and technical changes accumulate into a “future” that my press is ready to address is also part of my job description.
Though I think about the future of e-books and digital reading all the time, it is harder to say exactly how it will affect my position. The process of winnowing through the backlist will wrap up at some point, freeing a lot of time and attention. I expect that as the e-book market grows up and stabilizes, many e-book production issues will be absorbed into their related departments as a normal part of workflow. However, new formats for digital products will continue to call for re-evaluating rights and economic models. The distribution of e-book workflow throughout the press will mean that we will need a digital publishing group to coordinate changes and innovation in workflow processes. I am also likely to be kept busy searching through our content, and looking for opportunities to re-purpose it into new combinations, delivered through new distribution models. Finally, as my position is located in administration and parallels the rights department, it also seems likely that as current tasks are moved into other departments, new work will take on a narrower focus—perhaps increasing my time dealing with copyright, contracts, and piracy.
For more on how different presses are handling the evolving staffing requirements of digital publishing, check out the “Staffing for Digital Initiatives: Transition to Sustainable Models” session at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, from 3:30-4:45 on June 19.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
2010 has been a banner year for poetry published by university presses. Rae Armantrout’s Versed, published by Wesleyan University Press, was awarded the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Published by the University of California Press, Keith Waldrop’s Transcendental Studies was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry, for which Armantrout’s book and Open Interval by Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon (Pittsburgh University Press) were also nominated, making university press poetry three-fifths of the field. These are just a few of the most recent honors, continuing a long tradition of poetic excellence and innovation fostered at university presses.
What is it about university presses that have made them such a good home for so many talented poets? AAUP spoke with university press editors, one of the award-winning poets, and a poetry reviewer to get their takes on the subject.
Having previously worked with small independent presses, Pulitzer prize-winner Rae Armantrout has found that Wesleyan has been better able to manage publicity, including reviews and award submissions (which have certainly paid off!). She has developed a sense of trust in the Wesleyan staff, and is confident in their reliability: “If Suzanna [Tamminen, director and editor-in-chief of Wesleyan University Press] says a book will be out in June, it will.” Describing her “amazing and almost unbelievable” experience of going “from being a relatively obscure poet to getting this kind of recognition,” Armantrout asserted that the Wesleyan staff “deserve considerable credit.” The respect is mutual and the staff’s pride in Armantrout’s work is evident; Tamminen said of the poet: “[we] think very highly of her, it’s just great that the world is catching on to how great she is and how important her work is”
The factor that came up again and again in discussing why university presses can be an ideal home for poetry is the fact that they are mission-driven. Rachel Berchten, poetry and poetics editor at the University of California press, said, “UC Press’s mission statement—that we enrich ‘lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities’—is fulfilled by our publishing a range of poets and poetry.” Tamminen put it simply: “good poetry exhibits good thinking.” Poetry is “a different kind of thinking and expression” that is an essential component of the scholarly enterprise. This focus on the production of scholarship and new knowledge that drives university presses also contributes to what Tamminen describes as a “somewhat edgier feel,” and a sense that new work and creativity will be both welcomed and fostered.
Although university presses must maintain their financial viability, there is general agreement that they tend to be less guided by commercial considerations than their trade counterparts, who tend to publish poetry only by well-known authors. Craig Teicher, Poetry Reviews Editor for Publishers Weekly and Vice President of the National Book Critics Circle, would answer that the suitability of university presses for the enterprise, in part, boils down to economics: “poetry doesn’t make money.” Smaller houses like university presses, he noted, are more accustomed to smaller print runs, and finding and marketing to niche markets, which allows them to commit to publishing authors. University presses are also willing to take risks, for the sake of their scholarly mission, publishing “innovative or emerging poets or translations,” said Berchten. University presses also have a good reputation for keeping books in print, which is important to poets. This commitment, in addition to a tendency to develop long-term publishing relationships with authors, allows editors to “nurture someone’s voice or career,” noted Tamminen.
Practically, both California and Wesleyan have found that publishing poetry is very much like any other scholarly area. As in any other field, a primary motivator in acquisitions is how it fits in with the foundation and desired direction of the list. As poetry falls into trade rather than scholarly lists, Tamminen considers factors similar to those for regional books, such as “whether the author is going to be a good promoter of his or her work,” in terms of whether books will succeed. “Poetry is always changing and growing,” said Teicher, and for this reason publishers must make sure to keep up with the important networks and venues, to ensure they can “keep their lists current—with new poets whose work represents current stylistic trends—while also finding spots for all their older poets to whom they have a commitment.”
A strong poetry list can be a serious boon to a press as a whole. Tamminen explained that having such a high profile poetry program has definitely helped the press’s relationship to the university, as “the books go out into the world and carry the university’s name as home for great writing.” At California, Berchten has found that poetry “expands our presence in the trade media and trade market, as well as lending its lustre to UC Press as a whole.”
Going forward, Teicher said he believes that “university presses are only going to become more important.” He attributes this to what he sees as the increasing specificity of readers’ tastes as more and more work becomes available and easy to search and find. He said, “there will be more books, but fewer readers for each of them,” a circumstance he thinks trade publishers may shy away from and will lead to an increase in “literary books—not just poetry—being published, and published significantly…by independent, nonprofit, or university presses.”
Any discussion of the future of publishing necessarily touches on the issue of e-publication, and poetry is no different. California is currently publishing all of its new poetry books in e-book as well as print format, in what Berchten sees as “an expansion of our poetry program that will make these important works of literature available to an even larger audience.” Wesleyan is still in the process of converting all of its titles to e-books—they have found some formats work very well for the genre, while others, including EPUB, can cause problems because of the way text reflows. Tamminen said she thinks because of poetry’s small market share, technology has not been as quick to deal with its specific conversion issues, but she finds that the poets themselves are “already very active online and quite knowledgeable about e-books and the digital world—in fact we feel like they’re leading us.”
Whatever the format, all of the stakeholders we spoke with had confidence that university presses will continue to play an important role in publishing poetry and nurturing poets. Perhaps most importantly, as Armantrout attested, “university presses often have editors who care about poetry,” a factor that will continue to entice authors and ensure the respect of the scholarly community and the poetry-reading public. As she concluded of the recent string of successes university press-published poetry has seen, “it must mean something.”
David Sewell, Editorial and Technical Manager, ROTUNDA, University of Virginia Press
Kenneth Reed, Digital Production Specialist, The University of North Carolina Press
Any university press considering an XML-based workflow for monographs (whether from start to finish or as an archival format) has likely discovered that the first question may also be the knottiest: what kind of XML? Or to put it in more technically accurate terms, which XML language? The answer is far from obvious. The book markup language developed by the Association of American Publishers as long ago as the 1980s (originally in the ancestor of XML, SGML) is an international standard—ISO 12083—but to our knowledge it has been adopted by no university press other than California, and even then it required extensive modification. DocBook is well established as an authoring and archival language for books and serves publishers like O’Reilly as a natural format for “one source, many output” workflows, but it is highly optimized for technical documentation and lacks native markup elements for many structural features common in humanities and social science texts. (The University of Michigan Press has adopted it for production of some of their monograph titles, however.) EPUB/XHTML is perfectly suited to its purpose of encoding books for presentation on a wide variety of mobile devices, but its relatively impoverished set of structural and semantic tags may limit its value as an archival format for scholarly works.
An alternative increasingly being investigated is the markup language developed by the Text Encoding Initiative, or TEI, designed for the ambitious goal of creating machine-readable versions of texts in virtually any genre, from any historical period, and in any natural language. Following organizational work in the late 1980s, the first version of the TEI Guidelines was released in 1990, and was quickly adopted as the markup standard for a wide array of projects housed within university libraries and research departments engaged in digitizing books, manuscripts, drama, correspondence, and even mixed collections of text and images. Today there are literally thousands of texts encoded in TEI and in many cases published via the Web, often accompanied by a variety of full-text and data search tools (see http://www.tei-c.org/Activities/Projects/ for a list of over 100 such sites). The TEI Guidelines are actively maintained and developed by the TEI Consortium, with an international group of directors and editors from a variety of scholarly and professional backgrounds.
Clearly TEI-XML can be used to produce archival machine-readable versions of published books; existing off-the-shelf tools can be used to convert those files to HTML, PDF, and EPUB, although achieving results satisfactory to a professional publisher will usually require more or less customization. But is TEI-XML a viable answer to the XML workflow question? Can a publisher develop in-house procedures for converting existing books to an archival TEI format, or find a vendor capable of doing so? Alternatively, is it feasible to insert TEI-XML into the authoring workflow, so that it becomes the underlying source of both print and digital versions of a book? Over the past year or so, members of both the TEI and the university press communities have been meeting online and in person to address such questions.
The TEI Guidelines in their current form (version “P5”) are incredibly rich and comprehensive (over 1,400 pages in PDF form!), so approaching them can be quite daunting. The TEI Special Interest Groups (SIGs) were created to allow individuals to share ideas and develop much more focused uses of TEI. For the most part, these SIGs have been based in the academy, and centered on humanities scholarship, but they are open to anyone. The Scholarly Publishing SIG was created in June 2009 in order to explore the use of TEI in original scholarly publication. One of the aims of this SIG is to make TEI an attractive choice when deciding upon which XML language to use. XML is a costly investment: there will be a lot of time and resources devoted to its implementation. The university press community needs to collaborate on this front, and this SIG would serve as the starting point for progress. It will enable presses interested in using TEI to share developments with peer institutions as well as with the wider TEI community.
It is quite common to hear that TEI is a standard that is not implemented in any standard way. The SIG maintains a Wiki page that has a section on recommended practices. This document is still in its inception, but the purpose will be to create, through a collaborative process, a set of encoding guidelines that presses can use, either in XML-first or XML-last workflows. These guidelines could be used for in-house composition, or they could be supplied to encoding vendors for conversion after print publication. If enough presses adopt these guidelines, they could be used to set up common encoding practices and offer advantages when approaching vendors for XML encoding work, in much the same way that TEI Tite is being developed. These guidelines may lead to a specific customization of TEI for publishing, across books and journals.
The SIG will also focus on the XML workflow itself, and the tools required for such a workflow. There exists already a roundtrip transformation from Microsoft Word to TEI that could be improved upon through real-world use cases. Similarly, there are transformations for TEI to HTML and to EPUB. These need to be investigated and refined as well.
Another benefit that could be derived from a collaborative effort among university presses is the creation of a set of quality control rules using the rule-based validation language Schematron. Having well-formed and valid XML is only the first step—the XML needs to be checked with the same care and attention given to the print version. Having high-quality XML for use as the archival format for our content is vital. Presses need to be assured of this quality when they use the XML version to generate other formats, such as HTML or EPUB—or even for later editions in print. Creating a set of rules that every press can use to test their content would greatly aid in this effort.
A symposium was held at the Digital Humanities Observatory in Dublin on 28 April 2010 (see http://dho.ie/node/673) in order to discuss the growing interest in the use of TEI in scholarly publishing. The TEI community discussed their possible emerging role in scholarly communication and publishing. While the symposium ended with the question very much open, it was clear that coordination of work through the SIG was required. The TEI community has yet to decide whether they should focus their energies on tool development in this area, or on a specific customization of TEI for publishing, or even if they should engage in the publishing process directly. The university press community should take this moment to work together with the TEI community in order to make the transition to digital publishing.
Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP) began in 2007 when digital writing scholars Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe saw shrinking opportunities for scholars in the field to publish their work, and limitations that were becoming an increasing hindrance to the scholarship that was published. What was needed was a press that would publish “pieces that couldn’t be represented in the two-dimensional spaces of print,” said Selfe, Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. Importantly however, these publications would also need the intellectual authority that came from peer review in order to hold value in the academic world. These frustrations sparked the idea for CCDP, and Hawisher and Selfe soon recruited other scholars in the field to help get the project off the ground. Selfe described the initial questions they had to address as the project began to take shape: “what kind of a press would publish these digital projects” and “what it meant [for the projects] to have the same specific gravity as a book.”
Finding a publishing partner that exemplified “the same values as tenure and promotion committees,” would be crucial – there would be no incentive for scholars to take advantage of new technologies to publish avant-garde texts if their work would not be accepted by the larger academic community. Coincidentally, Selfe’s home campus, Ohio State University, was in the process of revising its tenure and promotion guidelines, with one of the goals being “to strip out print biases.” Going through this process at her own institution, Selfe was able to outline the key criteria that would be necessary to make CCDP projects viable and competitive: peer review, university presses as preferential publishers, and a continuing value placed on intellectual reach, scope, and excellence. This is where Utah State University Press came in. Having published with Michael Spooner at USU Press and elsewhere beforehand, and familiar with the strong reputation of the press’s existing composition and rhetoric list, the editors felt that the press would be the perfect publishing partner. Spooner’s previous work, and the stature of Utah State University Press ensured them that this imprimatur would provide the project the “academic legitimacy” they were seeking for CCDP. Hawisher, Professor of English and University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, described the confidence they had that USU Press would give young scholars, whose work she feels is not always recognized by traditional outlets, the attention they deserved.
Spooner explained that the press decided to present CCDP as an imprint because “the idea of CCDP was created with an identity separate from USU.” Despite its all-digital output, “editorially, the project operates very much like a standard university press series.” Selfe and Hawisher handle the acquisitions and peer review process. Completed manuscripts are then sent to USU Press’s editorial board for a final vetting.
Generally, the imprint relies on its authors’ own technical expertise for the production aspects of these digital works. The press negotiates specifications for handling layout with the authors and editors. The ability of the imprint’s authors to provide projects ready for online publication is related to the demands of the field: “this isn’t a process that I’d attempt with just any series or imprint,” said Spooner, “It happens that scholars in this field have a higher than average expertise with document design, web design, programming, etc., and because of their academic appointments, some have regular access to new publishing and design software.”
Marketing efforts for the imprint have come from both the press and the editors. USU Press provides visibility on its web site, Facebook page, e-catalog, and email blasts, as well as a presence on exhibit tables and in occasional space ads. The editors and their colleagues do a great deal of old-fashioned word-of-mouth marketing, promoting the imprint at conferences, on email lists, and through other venues of scholarly exchange. In keeping with their born-digital roots, reviews by bloggers are featured in sidebars on the book web pages. Spooner added that the value of having such well-regarded editors cannot be underestimated: “the informal buzz created by the editors, their students, and colleagues is the most effective marketing presence.”
The editors were also pleased to find that Spooner and USU Press were amenable to their commitment to open access for the imprint. A commitment to open access is something that many presses and institutions feel is valuable, but financial pressures often make it difficult to implement in reality. CCDP has been able to maintain their policy of accessibility through the support of USU Press, USU Libraries, partner institutions, and the scholars who assist the imprint in various capacities. The editors, their colleagues, graduate students, and the imprint’s authors (as described above) all contribute their time and skills. For a digital imprint, technological resources have been essential; Selfe describes CCDP as “building on the technological infrastructure and margins of universities.” The site was originally hosted by Miami University of Ohio, then moved to the Illinois Institute of Technology, and will now be moving to Utah State.
The publication of a report from an MLA Task Force, as well as more recent letters from current MLA president Sidonie Smith, are factors the editors see giving the profession a push to move towards acknowledging this sort of work. Of course, the “availability of different kinds of technology” is another impetus, as the possibilities for digital work continue to expand. Said Hawisher: “When we had the support of a university press, we believed that we could publish these books and that colleagues could use these books in their tenure portfolio.” She sees the increasing move to e-publication as inevitable (and beneficial for the field), and believes that this project is one facet of learning how to “make this [shift to e-publishing] work for all of us.” The editors face the challenge of acquiring work that is, as Selfe described it, “conventional enough to be recognized as scholarly projects in terms of historical and genre expectations, and yet interesting enough to push those boundaries that require digital environments to be understood.” The real test comes in putting these ideals into practice: an upcoming CCDP project will be , Selfe believes, “the first native digital text for tenure at a Big Ten institution.”
In addition to the Press and its university partners, CCDP also has an association with the Institute of the Future of the Book (if:book), which Selfe described as providing a “philosophical template,” as well as some of the necessary software infrastructure. Having worked with members of the staff previously, the editors felt the partnership would also encourage authors to produce books in different environments, like Sophie, an if:book-developed platform they hope to utilize in future projects.
As for the future of the imprint, both editors envision projects including an increasing variety of media, as they truly become something that can be published only in an online venue, and “push the envelope for what is [considered] a book.” Just in the two books published so far, and two forthcoming projects, they have seen an increase in the amount and variety of digital media that has been incorporated – a trend they expect to continue as technological advances widen the realm of possibility. They had originally anticipated that it would take five years before producing works that were challenging boundaries, but feel that their second book, Generaciones’ Narratives, has already moved in that direction, with its inclusion of video interviews. An increasing variety of digital components is particularly important Spooner explained, “because this is the very stuff that needs to be legitimated before the [promotion and tenure] process.” There has been discussion of adding a print-on-demand component to the imprint. Such an idea remains theoretical at this point however, due to the obvious challenges of transposing the digital aspects of the projects. Another trend the editors see increasing with the proliferation of born-digital work is that of collaborative authorship, to an extent that can be rare in the humanities. The evolving demands of these projects necessitate drawing on the resources of multiple scholars: “authorship often has to happen in teams,” said Selfe, “different people contribute different skills.”
Spooner emphasized the importance of CCDP’s evolving online presence as they learn about the best ways to build their publications: “it’s important to us and to the scholars/authors/readers in this part of the field to have things accessible now, even knowing that formats will evolve in future.” The partners are continuing in this collaborative and innovative spirit as they work towards the mission encapsulated in CCDP’s tagline: “Open access. Peer-reviewed. Online.”
Penelope Kaiserlian
Director, University of Virginia Press
In March 2010 a distinguished group of people involved in digital humanities gathered in Charlottesville to review the state of the field and to look ahead to future prospects. The conference, entitled “Online Humanities Scholarship: The Shape of Things to Come,” was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which has given generous support to many of the major online humanities projects of the last two decades. It was organized by Professor Jerome McGann, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia and creator of the Rossetti Archive, one of the earliest projects to show the promise of online humanities scholarship. Jennifer Howard reported on the conference in the April 4, 2010 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, “New Forms of Scholarship in a Digital World Challenge the Humanities.”
For those interested in the full proceedings, Rice University Press has published the conference papers and formal responses via online open access and print on demand (http://rup.rice.edu/shapeofthings). A court reporter was present to take down the discussion, and these informal remarks will be included later in the free online version of the publication. A sign of the times, several people in the audience were tweeting about the papers as they were being given, inviting comments from interested observers. These tweets may also be included in the online version.
Nine people were invited to give presentations on their Mellon-funded digital projects to a group that included senior Mellon Foundation officers, representatives of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, scholars from humanities disciplines, information technology experts, librarians, and publishers. I was asked to speak about Virginia’s experience with establishing our digital imprint, Rotunda, which publishes original digital projects and develops digital versions of some of the great documentary editions published by university presses. A few others from AAUP member presses were in attendance (Frank Smith, Cambridge; Fred Moody, Rice; David Nicholls, Modern Language Association; and Wendy Queen, Johns Hopkins). Paul Courant of the University of Michigan and Mike Keller of Stanford, who both have dual responsibilities as University Librarian and Publisher of their university presses, responded to my paper and reflected on the issue of perpetual stewardship and who should have responsibility for the preservation of digital projects. Of all the papers at the conference, I expect the presentations of most interest to AAUP members will be those by Robert Darnton, Paul Courant, and Mike Keller, as well as Chuck Henry’s reflections on what would be needed for university presses to work together to adopt a common digital platform for scholarly publications.
Most of the major digital humanities projects of the last two decades have been developed without participation by traditional scholarly publishers and have been supported by grant funding, university digital humanities centers, and a great deal of effort on the part of faculty and students. Various ways to sustain digital projects have been carefully examined in a November 2009 Ithaka report, “Sustaining Digital Resources,” but the issue of sustainability inevitably recurred here. McGann titled his introduction, “Sustainability: The Elephant in the Room.” (“Love will find a way,” as one of the participants said). Many of the projects presented have become crucial tools for their disciplines, such as Greg Nagy’s Homer Multi-Text Project, Roger Bagnall’s Integrating Digital Papyrology, and Kenneth Price’s The Walt Whitman Archive. Other more recent projects use digital tools for a fresh look at familiar materials, such as Alison Muri’s The Grub Street Project. Alan Burdette’s EVIA Digital Archive Project sets out to annotate ethnographic field video created by scholars as part of their research, using contemporary tools to address the problem of organizing and preserving several decades of audiovisual documentation that is “now in danger of being lost forever.”
Kenneth Price, current president of the Association for Documentary Editing, discussed an idea for a Civil War Washington project that had grown out of his team’s work on the Whitman Archive. He writes, “More than most types of humanistic scholarship, editing has been significantly altered by the digital turn, though perhaps even editing has not been sufficiently altered. The monumental scholarly edition, our marvelous inheritance from print culture, still tends to focus on individual figures.” He advocates “topic-based approaches that employ a tightly integrated combination of editing, collecting, interpreting, and tool building. We might even end up producing scholarship that could restore the standing of editing in English and History departments, whose faculty, paradoxically, often use and admire scholarly editions even while they are unwilling to hire, tenure, or promote a scholar who produces that work.”
The published report will give links to the nine featured projects as well as some that were developed by respondents. Most of these projects could not have been published in print, and some take advantage of tools that were not available even six years ago. My vote for the coolest project is Todd Presner’s Hyper Cities Project: Berlin and Los Angeles, developed at UCLA in collaboration with USC. Some time ago the University of Chicago Press took a look at the possibility of publishing a historical atlas of Chicago showing the various townships with developments over time—could we do overlays, or would the atlas need to have dozens of repetitive spreads that a reader would flip through, looking for points of change? We abandoned the idea as impossibly costly. Now the problem is imaginatively solved by the use of Google Maps and Google Earth. The Hyper Cities Project uses these tools to provide historical layers of city spaces. UCLA has prepared a narration through time and place for Berlin and Los Angeles. Other developers have been able to adapt the tools to add to the Hyper Cities collection. Presner said that more than 90% of the material in the project is on external servers and was not originated by UCLA.
While much of the conference dealt with matters that are not on the current agenda of university presses, there was also much useful discussion that will give us some insight into the “shape of things to come.”
For more on digital humanities and scholarly publishing, check out plenary session “Digital Humanities is not an Oxymoron” at the AAUP Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City (Saturday, June 19, 1:45-3:00).
In FY 2009, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded 32% of peer-reviewed project proposals through its grants programs. In that same year, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) was able to fund less than 17% of peer-reviewed proposals with its program funds. Approximately $60 million over FY 2010 levels of funding is needed to make up that gap in funding for humanities research and teaching. One hundred members of the National Humanities Alliance, including representatives from AAUP and member presses, went to Capitol Hill on March 9 to ask Congress to make up this difference with a total of $204 million in NEH program funds and to strongly oppose the president’s proposed cuts of approximately $7.2 million to the Endowment.
The other federal humanities funding agency of significance to scholarly publishing is the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the grant-making arm of the National Archives. Humanities advocates also lobbied Congress for program funds of $10 million for the NHPRC. Importantly, Congress is also being asked to consider reauthorizing the NHPRC at $20 million, raising the cap of possible funding.
More recently, on May 3 the “Preserving the American Historical Record Act” (PAHR) (S. 3227) was introduced by Senators Hatch and Levin to establish a program of formula grants to support archives and the preservation of historical records at the state and local level through the National Archives. The act is identical to legislation introduced in the House last year and is endorsed by the National Coalition for History.
NHA Issues at a Glance: http://www.nhalliance.org/advocacy/issues/index.shtml
PAHR Act: http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=111_cong_bills&docid=f:s3227is.txt.pdf
Staff at AAUP member presses are encouraged to submit article proposals to the Exchange about initiatives at member presses, industry news or trends, and other topics of interest to the scholarly publishing community. Feature articles are typically 700-1300 words in length.
The copy deadline for the Summer 2010 issue of the Exchange will be Monday, August 2. Initial proposals should generally be submitted at least one month in advance of the copy deadline.
Proposals may be sent to the Exchange editor, Meredith Benjamin, at mbenjamin@aaupnet.org.
Where the Readers Are: University Presses Explore Online Advertising
Reports from the 2009 Week-in-Residence Grantees
E-Catalogs: From Wish List to Reality
AAUP at MLA 2009
Digital Publishing in the AAUP Community
Public Access and Scholarly Publishing
Miscellany:
2010 Book, Jacket, & Journal Show Selected Entries Announced
Google Settlement Update
Books for Understanding: In the News
PROSE Awards
Submission Policy
Calendar: See the events calendar at www.aaupnet.org
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Meredith Benjamin
Communications Coordinator, AAUP
Each year, a group of middle and upper level staff members from AAUP member presses are selected to spend a week in residence at another press, providing an opportunity for professional exchange. Grantees typically spend their time at presses larger than their own. Finding scalable models that would translate well at their home presses, this year’s participants illustrated how similarities among university press are often greater than their differences.
Steven Yates, Marketing Director for the University Press of Mississippi spent his week with various members of NYU Press’s marketing team, with the goal of “learn[ing] how electronic marketing…is being executed at the ground level, and then how that work is coordinated into an overall marketing program.” Emma Cook, who organized his residency, Joe Gallagher, Brandon Kelley, and various other NYU staff, were generous in sharing their time, expertise, and files, affording Yates “every opportunity to seek the knowledge Mississippi needed.”
Yates was interested to learn from Kelley about NYU’s two-pronged approach of seeing e-marketing “as a support rather than a future replacement of printed direct mail.” He appreciated Gallagher’s candor in sharing “both his successes and his struggles” in the development of web sites, email lists, a press blog, and video content. This practical knowledge, combined with bigger-picture discussions that concluded his visit, provided Yates with a wealth of ideas on “how Mississippi might shape and refine its tactics based on current resources.”
Acquisitions Editor for the University Press of Kentucky Laura Sutton had her time spread out over the development, marketing, and editorial departments of the University of Texas Press, allowing her to “pick up information on behalf of the entire home press.” Working with Director Joanna Hitchcock who organized her visit, and staff across departments, she found that “UTP is not so large that Press practices might be irrelevant to how we do things at UPK.” Texas’s strategy of involving the press director and a core group of individuals in fundraising, “creative, high-energy” editorial meetings, and approach to their regional list were all things that could translate well at the University Press of Kentucky.
Sutton also noted the way in which the professional exchange was truly reciprocal: “For UTP’s part, several staff members noted that it was useful to explain and defend their practices to an outsider, perhaps more so now that UTP is looking critically at how it does business and begins to develop a new strategic plan.”
Further west, University of Nevada Press Marketing & Sales Manager Barbara Berlin spent her week at the University of Arizona press, taking the opportunity to work with Kathryn Conrad, who “is known as an excellent marketing manager.” Having spent many years in journals marketing, Berlin planned to expand her marketing knowledge in the areas of scholarly and trade books.
Having chosen to visit Arizona because of the similarity of its list to Nevada’s, Berlin found that many of their practices and marketing strategies would be applicable when she returned: “Although Arizona has a marketing department of five, unlike my own of only me (and a part time assistant), I began to see what I could take from them and revise to my own resources and time, and what I needed to leave alone for the time being.” Like many of her fellow participants, Berlin described the best part of the experience as the network of colleagues she developed, and is now able to call on when she has questions or needs advice.
The Chicago Distribution Center (CDC) played host to Sara Davis, Manager of Distribution and Inventory for Harvard University Press, allowing her an opportunity to “gain a fresh perspective on different ways of handling similar situations,” as she observed the operations at CDC’s warehouse, their client relations, and the University of Chicago Press’s Bibliovault. During her stay, organized by Sue Tranchita and facilitated by various members of the CDC staff, Davis was particularly impressed with the CDC’s system for handling returns and their metrics for warehouse productivity.
While the CDC operates on a larger scale than Harvard’s warehouse, TriLiteral (TLT), does, Davis was able to find aspects of Chicago’s strategies that were adaptable to TLT, including a system of measuring warehouse productivity (which she presented to her Executive Committee upon her return), making more detailed or customized reports to distribution customers, and pushing for more direct connection between customer service and the warehouse.
Raymond Lambert, Editorial Manager for the Duke Mathematical Journal at Duke University Press, also traveled to Chicago, spending his week with the University of Chicago Press’s Journals Division. Lambert’s trip, organized by Diane Lang, gave him “a thorough overview of UCP’s journals operations and a comprehensive understanding of UCP’s editorial processes,” as well as a “chance to discuss broader topics related to scholarly journals publishing” during less formal lunch meetings with staff. Given Duke’s recent acquisition of mathematics and science journals, he described how they “may have to think differently in the near future,” and how his visit gave him “an appreciation of this and also spurred me to brainstorm about possible ways to improve our current processes.”
Lambert’s experience at Chicago highlighted the way in which the residencies are a boon not only to one staff member, but to the entire home press. Before leaving for Chicago, he met with various Duke staff members to hear what they were interested to know about Chicago, and upon his return, offered a well-attended presentation to his colleagues, many of whom expressed interest in continued exchange and cooperation with those at Chicago. Lambert also remarked on the reciprocity of the experience, as he shared information about Duke’s processes and vendors with interested Chicago staffers.
In closing, Lambert emphasized the collegiality and cooperation that has perennially characterized the experience of week-in-residence grantees: “I quite enjoyed feeling like a contributing member of the scholarly publishing/university press community. The week-in-residence experience deepened my perspective of the university press’s role in scholarly communications.”
More information on the Whiting Week-in-Residence program can be found here: http://www.aaupnet.org/programs/meetings.html#week. Applications for the 2010 program will be available in March.