The Ann Arbor News has an article about ProQuest CSA (the company formed when CSA bought the reference division of ProQuest), which will be adopting the simple name ProQuest. The company’s new CEO says that sales are strong, the product pipeline is in good shape, and they have plans to hire plenty of new employees over the coming months.
Meanwhile, EBSCO is buying two of ABC-CLIO’s longest-running history databases. Here’s a description from PersonaNonData. It makes sense that ABC-CLIO is divesting itself of these abstracting databases to focus on their newer full-text offerings that are filled entirely with original ABC-CLIO data. On that note, the companies also announced that EBSCO has licensed 8 of ABC-CLIO’s other databases. It’s mainly to make it easier for librarians from a purchasing and logistical standpoint, as users of these databases will be directed to ABC-CLIO’s own electronic platform.
The American Library Association’s annual convention is this coming weekend in Washington, D.C. I’m gearing up for a busy slate of meetings with our publishing clients, partners, and librarian advisors. Having been to D.C. in late June once before, I’m not terribly enthused about the prospects of the hot, humid, sauna-like weather. And wearing a suit and tie, to boot! But the meetings should be very interesting and useful, so I’m looking forward to it.
And the convention also always provides an opportunity to see what other publishers are focusing on. On that note, I’ve been interested to see that a couple of publishers are launching huge, multivolume reference works. First, Oxford University Press is touting its forthcoming African American National Biography: 8 volumes, with a pre-pub price of $795 ($995 thereafter). OUP actually published a very abbreviated volume in this line, African American Lives, a couple of years ago. (We coordinated the copy editing and fact-checking of that volume.) The new set, to be published in February 2008, will expand the coverage to 4,000 biographies.
An even bigger project is being launched by ABC-CLIO. Their upcoming Encyclopedia of World History will comprise a jaw-dropping, door-stopping 21 volumes, at a price of $1,845. They are advertising an April 2008 publication date. As the saying goes, more is more.
Congressional Quarterly Press and the New York Times have formed an imprint called TimesReference to produce a new series of reference books for libraries. The books will apparently utilize material from the NYT’s archives. Here’s a brief story about it from MediaBistro.
The news is in: Thomson is selling its Learning division (of which Gale is one component) to a pair of private equity firms, Apax and OMERS. The price is $7.7 billion, quite a bit higher than the initial $5 billion price tag that analysts assumed the division would carry. (Read an article about the sale here.) One doubts there will be huge changes at any of the individual companies, but time will tell. Interesting side note: Apax has an advisory board whose chair is none other than Lord John Browne, former head of British Petroleum, who was forced to step down from BP last week after a scandal.
The Toronto Globe and Mail offers an interesting take on Thomson’s proposed buyout of the famed media company Reuters. Thomson will fund this buyout in part with the proceeds from the sale of its Learning Division.
The Chicago Tribune has an article today announcing an ambitious new online reference project, the Encyclopedia of Life. The project will entail a multiyear effort to catalog all of Earth’s species, with each species getting its own Web page and a consistent treatment and format. An astonishing $50 million has been pledged by various cultural and philanthropic organizations for the project; the resulting resource will be free. Apparently, articles will be written and vetted by scientists. It sounds like a fantastic resource, and at the same time it underscores the difficulty facing traditional reference publishers. When the site gains enough content mass, there won’t be much need for libraries to purchase traditional animal life encyclopedias. Having been a part of one terrific such set, the 2nd edition of Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia for Gale, this saddens me. As the head of a fledgling independent reference publisher, I also know that there are still multiple areas where our expertise in producing quality reference works can be of use and can result in good, viable projects. Our job in the coming years will be to find those publishing opportunities and address them with creativity and passion. One thing is clear: the trend toward free, scholarly Internt reference sources–the kind not as easily dismissed from a validity standpoint as Wikipedia–will continue.
Library Journal has an interesting q&A with Benjamin Johnson, an associate professor of history at SMU and faciltator of the Bush Library Blog, whose aim is to bring about wider debate about the Bush Presidential Library and Institute coming to the university. Read the LJ article here.
The PersonaNonData blog has another interesting post about the Thomson Learning sale. Click here.
The new issue of Against the Grain has a fascinating op-ed by Matthew J. Bruccoli, the scholar and legendary founder of the reference firm Bruccoli Clark Layman, which originated and has produced 375 volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography (published by Gale) over the past 30 years. The piece is titled “The End of Books and the Death of Libraries,” and the title pretty much says it all. Bruccoli writes that “books for study, books for research, [and] books for reference” are “imperiled.” He decries the rise of the so-called virtual library and bashes librarians’ role in bringing it about:
“I do not know why librarians are eager to collaborate in the destruction of their profession by means of their estactic participation in the destruction of that irreplaceable research instrument, the card catalogue, and their orgiastic discarding of books and newspaper runs.”
He later notes:
“I am particularly concerned about the impending death of reference books. Books for entertainment will last, but the reference book is terminal. The death-bed is surrounded by librarians, teachers, and even putative publishers who are yanking out the life-support tubes.”
Strong words, indeed. I happen to agree with much of what he says about the differences between printed books and “virtual” ones, about the need for libraries to act as repositories for books, about the usefulness of books in their own right. And I agree that libraries are entering dangerous territory with their rush to digitize their collections to make them availble for online searching, and their abandonment of books in general and print reference in particular. On the other hand, I think that Bruccoli fails to understand the very real and beneficial aspects of being able to conduct electronic research across reference collections. Anyone who has conducted research using a big online reference suite such as Gale’s InfoTrac or Virtual Reference Library knows how supremely useful these online sources can be.
It seems to me that in an ideal world, libraries would protect and cherish books of all types, recognizing that these books have very real functional, and educational, value. At the same time, they would take advantage of electronic reference sources that also have a real, functional value. Of course, we don’t live anywhere near “an ideal world.” Libraries lack the funding to invest heavily in print as well as electronic sources and to add new buildings to hold larger print collections. We simply don’t pay enough taxes for libraries to have their cake and eat it too. Still, I think Bruccoli’s contrarian view is an important one, and librarians, educators, and publishers would do well to keep it mind.
And for a final obvious and somewhat ironic point: The article is not available online, as far as I know, but I’ll be circulating it among our staff, at least.
From the Rocky Mountain News comes word today that Elizabeth Geiser is retiring as director of the Publishing Institute at the University of Denver. I attended the institute in 1989, and like everyone who has come across Elizabeth, I was immediately struck by her warmth and graciousness. She was famous for greeting every student on the first day of registration with a firm handshake and a recitation of the person’s name, college attended, and other personal details, all of which she had memorized. She seemed to know everyone who was anyone in the publishing industry, and those everyones all seeemed to adore her. It was her institute that launched me on my career in reference publishing; interestingly enough, I ran into Elizabeth on my very first day in my very first job–at what was then known as Gale Research. (Elizabeth had been an employee of Gale for several years, and before that at such companies as Bowker.) Elizabeth has singlehandedly groomed an entire generation of publishing executives, and I count myself lucky to be among them. Taking over for Elizabeth is Joyce Meskis, owner of Denver’s legendary and stupendous independent bookstore, The Tattered Cover. Good luck to both Elizabeth and Joyce.
The Financial Times has provided an update on Thomson’s plans to sell its Thomson Learning division. The PersonaNonData blog has a good summary of the article.
“Anything you can do I can do better.” So goes the famous line from Irving Berlin in Annie Get Your Gun. I was reminded of it while flipping through this month’s School Library Journal. In this issue, three of the major library reference publishers have decided to trumpet their current issues electronic databases. ABC-CLIO’s is called Issues: Understanding Controversy and Society. Gale’s is called Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. And Ebsco’s is called Points of View Reference Center. I’m sure they are all excellent resources, and I wouldn’t want to be competing directly with any of them. Still, I find it somewhat amusing.
On another topic, this month’s issue of American Libraries has a cover story about the Chicago Public Library’s branch-building boom over the past decade. As a former resident of Chicago and patron of the CPL, I can attest to what an excellent system it is. More than anything, its vitality is a testament to having a strong mayor who considers a great library system a major civic priority and who was smart enough to appoint a highly competent commissioner (Mary Dempsey) and give her substantial authority.
Gale has launched another direct-to-consumer Web project to showcase their content, in case their social issues content. The site has the somewhat unwieldy name of WiseTo Social Issues, and it features a small amount of free content, which is mainly designed to get researchers to buy monthly premium passes on an individual topic; the premium passes cost $7.99 for a 30-day access pass. The site also makes use of Google ads.
Library Journal has released its annual list of best reference sources. This particular list has the great advantage of including both print and electronic-only resources. (Of course, these days, nearly all of the print titles are also available online.) Among the highlights for me are Cambridge’s Historical Stastitics of the United States, which I would love to own if only it weren’t for that $990 price tag; Macmillan’s Encyclopedia of India; and Mideastwire.com, which I am not too familiar with but which looks like a wonderfully useful information tool–the kind any of us in this business would love to produce. You can see the full list here.
The Toronto Globe and Mail has an article about the bidders for the Thomson Learning division. No surprise: the bidders are all private equity firms. Apparently a decision is expected by the end of June.
Check out this blog post by Jenny Levine (the Shifted Librarian) from the in-progress CIC Library Conference. (CIC stands for the Committee on Institutional Cooperation; it’s essentially a consortium of the Big Ten universities plus a couple of others, e.g. the University of Chicago, thrown in for good measure. At least on the library side, I believe the consortium acts as a single purchaser of library materials, at least in some instances.) The title of the panel was “The Agile Organization: Looking to the Future,” and it included some colleagues and friends. One was Frank Menchaca of Thomson Gale, whom I first met as part of our work on the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives (Frank used to be the publisher of the Charles Scribner’s Sons imprint at TG before moving on to bigger things). Another was Chris McKenzie, a former colleague of mine at Gale and a good friend to boot who is now at John Wiley & Sons. The third speaker was Stephen Rhind-Tutt, one of the founders and currently the CEO of Alexander Street Press. You can see from J. Levine’s blog post that the topic of discussion was germane to everything we do at Schlager Group and that it got to the heart of the challenges and opportunities facing the information industry, and in that I include both publishers and librarians. Menchaca talked about how Gale is dealing with the challenges: experimenting with placing some of its content on the open Web, making some metadata available to search engines like Google, and requiring its staff (including content editors) to communicate much more heavily with students, teachers, and librarians than they have in the past. McKenzie discussed the issues facing college textbooks. Rhind-Tutt explained Alexander Street’s publishing approach, which includes not trying to compete with other publishers but rather to offer unique, fresh, original content that is heavily indexed and linked as much as possible to other sources.
And I can’t help but be amazed: This panel finished speaking perhaps 90 minutes ago.
I’m including a link here to a blog posting by Karen G. Schneider at the ALA TechSource Blog. It’s pretty scorching, and I think all of us who work on the publishing side of the library marketplace equation should read it and understand just how much debate and soul-searching is going on among librarians about the digitization projects underway by Google and others. I think she makes many valid points, and I continue to fear for the future of libraries in our society, just as do many librarians. If libraries as we know them cease to exist, then so will a company like ours–unless we can find a way to succeed in the digitial universe dominated by Google, Microsoft, Thomson, and others. Our challenge is to find a way–using all the flexibility and nimbleness that a little company like ours has at its disposal–to carve out a sustainable niche in an information industry buffeted by enormous change. My hope is that libraries will continue to be a huge portion of that niche.
A blog that I enjoy reading, PersonaNonData, has a couple of recent postings about the Google Book Search program. I thought it was a good time to link to these in light of the public scolding Microsoft gave to Google earlier this week about the latter’s cavalier approach to copyright. Of course, Microsoft has a vested interest in doing whatever it can to promote itself at the expense of Google. Nonetheless, there is truth to its arguments about Google, as many publishers will attest.
One of the aforementioned posts discusses the results of the Google program so far; apparently, there is some question about the quality of the OCR scans that are at the heart of the program. The second post sheds some light on the dubious claims by Google about how many books are under copyright but out of print and thus neglected; Google claims the number is nearly 30 million, while other assessments indicate it may be closer to 5 million.
The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) has announced the finalists for its annual CODiE awards. Included among the categories are several having to do with reference databases, and the finalists this year include offerings from Thomson Gale (including Science Resource Center and Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center), ABC-Clio (United States at War: Understanding Conflict and Society), and Oxford University Press (Oxford African American Studies Center).
This article from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation states that the sale of the Thomson Learning division by its corporate parent will be “likely to a private equity investor.” This view has not changed since the news of the sale was first announced a few weeks ago, and it adds further weight to the notion that very little will change in the ongoing operations of Gale (just one among many companies of Thomson Learning) after the sale. Many of our freelancers have been justifiably concerned about the sale, but the repeated indications about the likely buyer should alleviate the trepidation.