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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.
I’m happy to announce that we will soon be rolling out a new wiki site. It will be password-protected and aimed at the editors and writers working on our various projects. At least at first, we won’t take much advantage of the community-input technology built into wikis; our pages will mostly be locked except to our in-house staff. However, the wiki will make it much easier for our staff to post project updates, alerts, and so forth. And down the road we do indeed hope to incorporate some of the community-input technology to make our wiki more like, well, a wiki. If you are an editor or writer on one of our projects, stay tuned for more about this site.
Also on the technology front, we will soon be migrating this blog to a new and better software platform (WordPress), and in addition will be launching a new blog by Marcia Merryman-Means. Marcia is our resident Grammar Goddess, and she will use her blog to focus on matters of grammar and style and usage. I look forward to reading her blog, which I know will be witty and occasionally biting and always interesting–much like Marcia herself. Just as this blog tends to be a little bland, just like me!
Our staff know that I am a sucker for new technology gadgets and software, so I of course am quite excited about these new software tools. My hope is that they will work well and seamlessly, unlike another recent technology endeavor here at Schlager Group–the adoption of Perl scripts to try to automate some of our CA research and sketch compilation. This has been our first experience with custom programming, and with Perl in particular, and one thing I can definitely say is that it’s been a good learning experience for all of us. So far it hasn’t quite worked out as we had hoped, and the jury is still out on whether this particular project will result in anything of value, or whether we’ll have to scrap most of the custom programming and revert to old habits. Even if that happens, however, our knowledge of this terrain has been greatly improved. I remain a big believer that technology tools can really boost productivity in our business, if they are the right tools and if they are properly implemented. Sometimes, as with Perl, we find out that circumstances outside our control (e.g., the inconsistency of source data) make those tools less valuable than we thought they would be, and we find ourselves not on the cutting edge but on the bleeding edge. But my staff doesn’t call me “Mr. Optimism” for nothing. I’m always convinced there is a great new tool just around the corner. All we have to do is discover it.
Speaking of optimism, I’m confident that you’ll like our updated, freshened (Marcia, if that is not a word, forgive me) corporate logo, which is coming together right now. It will make its debut when we re-launch our corporate Web site later this summer. At that time, we’ll also be able to take the wraps off the new venture we are launching. It should be an eventful summer here at Schlager Group.
In a recent post I blogged about the ongoing rumor that President Bush will choose Southern Methodist University as the site of his presidential library, and that part of the package will be a new conservative think tank that presumably will churn out scholarship that supports the policies he followed throughout his tenure. Today’s Dallas Morning News brings word that some SMU professors are asking for more discussion about this before the university signs on any dotted line. Theology School professor Susanne Johnson has circulated a letter among the faculty to this effect, commenting: “There are two different visions of the library. One is for the library as a place for academic inquiry … but the other vision is a strictly partisan center to promote the president’s platform.” An English professor who signed the letter, Beth Newman, told the newspaper: “I am troubled by the likelihood that [the library] will bring with it a right-wing think tank, an institute that advocates for right-wing causes.” It will be interesting to follow this debate, but I have a hard time imagining it will matter in the end. If the president chooses SMU for the library and think tank, the university will sign wherever it has to sign as quickly as it possibly can.
On another topic, I want to apologize to any of you who may try to read this blog through a news aggregrator such as Technorati or NewsGator. I have tried my best to get the RSS feed of the blog to work properly, but for some reason those sites seem to have trouble picking it up. My suspicion is that the fault lies with the blog software, which is provided by Hostway.com. This company does a great job of hosting our company website, but their blog software has many serious flaws. For instance, it cannot provide usage statistics. In the new year I will be switching to a new blogging software, but which one is a question mark. I’m waiting and hoping that the SuiteTwo software, which promises RSS feeds, blogging, wikis, and more, will arrive quickly–and that it will be affordable to a small company like ours. If not, I’ll choose another route. But for now, you’ll have to come directly to this site to see my latest postings.
Two more Schlager Group-produced encyclopedias have been published. First up is the World Religions Reference Library, a three-volume set from Gale’s UXL imprint. Next is the newest volume (#7) in the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives series. You can find more information about both titles at Thomson Gale’s website. When reviews come in, I’ll post news of them.
Lee and Brenda Lerner, our friends at Lerner & Lerner, checked in from another whirlwind trip (London, Dublin, Egypt, and now on to Moscow, Paris, London, and Scotland) to say hello. It sounds like they saw some great sights in Egypt, and were lucky enough to get private tours of some of the ancient monuments. He wrote this:
We were both surprised, however, at our strong claustrophobic feelings inside the great pyramids. For the Khafre pyramid one descends a shaft 4 ft by 4 ft for 100 meters at 30 degree angle. You obviously can not stand. They have wooden planking on floor and so you bend over and sort of scoot and spider walk. At some point you must force yourself to keep going down. After 100 m there is a chamber you can stand and then another small shaft for 50 m at 30 degrees upwards to burial chamber. Italian Egyptologist Giovanni Belzoni left his mark on the wall there in 1818. The air is as stale and dank — you struggle to breathe. Not death defying — but some psychological challenge.
Lee also made a very interesting comment to my posting from August 29 (”Ernesto Bids Us Adieu“). He offers smart insights into the difficulties of the print reference business, the whims of critics, and the need to diversify for small producers like Lerner & Lerner and Schlager Group. Here’s hoping that Lee and Brenda start a blog at some point.
Information Today has another article on Wikipedia battles. In the latest go-round, a longtime Wikipedia critic has found more instances of plagiarism. Also, apparently some hackers did some damage, infecting the site with a worm that generated tons of spam for users.
Speaking of spam, we’ve been inundated by it ourselves in the past few months. We have finally found some relief with a new software program that is drastically reducing our spam levels, not to mention providing better security against those aforementioned worms. (This, after one of our computers was waylaid by a worm last week.)
The new issue of Referencer & User Services Quarterly has an article on the best free reference Web sites. RUSA gives these citations every year. This year’s list includes interesting sites such as AF: Acronym Finder (self-explanatory) and American Rhetoric, which offers a speech bank. It also includes How Products Are Made, yet another Thomson Gale initiative to make some of its content available for low or no cost on the Internet. I was fortunate to edit the very first volume in the HPM series, back in the early 1990s when I worked at Gale. The series has since grown to 7 volumes. How interesting to see these articles online again now. Some of them are a wee bit out of date, as some site users have pointed out. (Yes, readers can make comments about any article, just as in a blog.) The site is supported by text advertising via Google. Another interesting endeavor by Thomson Gale. I wonder how many other such sites TG has developed that I’m unaware of?
Fresh on the heels of the Encyclopedia of the World’s Nations and Cultures, which I blogged about yesterday, is another new release of ours from Facts On File: The World Encyclopedia of Political Systems and Parties. This three-volume title was very challenging to edit, given that the information it contained changes so frequently. But it includes a ton of useful information.
The four-volume Encyclopedia of the World’s Nations and Cultures, which we produed for Facts On File, has been published. Here is a link to the publisher’s website; from there you can reach the page for this title.
Kris Williamson, former Schlager Group employee and all-around good guy now in Malaysia on a research internship, occasionally sends reports of his travels around the region. I’ve copied his latest report below.
Hi Neil…
I’m back from my trip to Sarawak, part of Malaysian Borneo. Overall, I’d have to say that I had a nice time. It was a weeklong trip along the north coast of the island from near the border of Brunei Darussalam (whose sultan is the richest man in the world) to the state capital, Kuching. I acquired the airfare from KL (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital, where I’m staying) to Sarawak on an open-jaw return for about US$5 excluding tax. Forget about Southwest Airlines…THIS is what I call budget airline prices.
I started my trip in Miri, Sarawak’s 2nd largest city. It used to be an oil boomtown, but now economically relies on tourists from Brunei to fill their pubs, clubs, and restaurants vacated by the oil workers. This is quite lucrative, however, since Brunei forbids the sale of alcohol in their national borders.
Next I traveled south to Bintulu, a lucrative (mostly illegal) timber town.
You don’t get a sense of the mass deforestation going on here sticking close to the coast, but you don’t have to go too far inland to find bare patches of land where rainforests once stood. The size of the houses of these timber barons is a testament to how much influence they have over the government in being allowed to cut down however much they want. This town, 4 hours drive away from the next nearest urban center, is also home to the world’s largest liquid natural gas plant in the world. Uneventful, but its construction most likely dates back to the previous prime minister, Mahathir, who (probably for personal, physical shortcomings of his own) saw the need for his country to break international records for biggest, tallest, longest, etc., structures in the world.
After that stopover, I continued down to Sibu, the 3rd largest city in Sarawak. It is nicknamed New Foo Chow due to the large number of immigrants from that region in China. Parts of the city do feel like China; I went walking around the commercial district and hardly saw a Malay, Indian, or indigenous Bornean. Sibu is reportedly home to the oldest standing Chinese building on Borneo, the Tua Pek Kong temple. At night, however, it lights up to look more like a float in Disney’s night parade.
My last stop was Kuching, the state capital and largest (or maybe 2nd
largest) city on Borneo. Kuching is consistently rated by various travel publications as the “most livable” city in Asia. I don’t know if I would want to live there, but it was certainly more comfortable than the rest of the state. In Malay, the word ‘kuching’ means ‘cat.’ And this city takes its moniker and really uses it: cat statues, museums, shapes incorporated into buildings, and certainly all the tourist paraphernalia that you can buy. I was there for the Chinese mooncake festival so the Chinatown part of the city was quiet festive. Unfortunately, I was not able to get one of the signature mooncakes of the area (or any food, for that matter) made with live sago worms in it. I decided I would try it while I was there…but after an honest attempt to find some of those foods and coming up empty-handed, I was saved from truly testing my stomach’s “iron constitution.” About the weirdest (or shall I say, least familiar in the US?) food I tried here that I don’t normally eat in KL was a squid chili sauce-cum-soup. I normally eat this chili sauce-cum-soup with whole-fried minnows, not squid.
Not wanting to leave Borneo without having a nature story, I spent a day in Bako National Park, only about 45 minutes out of Kuching. When I reached the last village on the way to the park, I had to take a boat down river to finish the trip since there are no roads into the park itself. The return fare for chartering a boat (marked on a signboard written in Malay…so it wasn’t a tourist scam) was about US$25…five times more than my return airfare from the Malay Peninsula! Once dropped off in the park, there is a campsite, a few chalets, and a map. My friend and I managed to do just 2 of the trails that day…I love hiking and have lots of time put in on the trails in the Appalachians and various parks out in California…but this was really hard compared to those! And to make it worse, the friend I was traveling with, a Muslim, was fasting because it is the month of Ramadan. So…out of respect (or guilt?) I also fasted…no food or water from about 4:30am to 6:30pm. That’s not good when hiking in the rainforests of Borneo though. We survived, but did not cover as much ground as expected!
In the process, however, I got to see proboscis monkeys, macaques, flying squirrels, bearded pigs, a plethora of insects and bird, and personally got to feel the bite of somewhere around one billion mosquitoes. I left feeling triumphant, however, because I managed to do this without acquiring any hitchhiking leeches along the way!
So back in KL now, I see that the haze originating in Sumatra has gotten worse and the city is once again covered in a blanket of smoke. I haven’t seen the sun in over a week. Nevertheless, I’m back safely and parasite free (that I know of).
Today’s New York Times Book Review features a review of a new biography of Johnny Cash written by Michael Streissguth. Thanks to the efforts of editor in chief Arnold Markoe, we were lucky enough to have Streissguth write the article on Cash for the forthcoming volume of the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives. The NYTBR review of Streissguth’s biography was written by historian Douglas Brinkley, who gives a very favorable opinion of the book. Congrats, Dr. Streissguth.
The new issue of Library Journal has a review of Concise Major 21st-Century Writers, which is a subset of Contemporary Authors. We produced much of the content for this title, although like all of our work for CA, we receive no credit. (The reason why remains somewhat of a mystery to me, although it has to do with the very modern nature of CA, which is a giant database out of which various print volumes are extracted each month. Apparently, the publisher isn’t always able to know which content we might have produced in any given volume and thus has decided not to credit us in the frontmatter of each volume.) The LJ reviewer recommends the set and says it is “bound to come in handy for students and those working with them.”
One subject I’ve been meaning to blog about for some time now is the freelance life. We get resumes on a weekly basis from writers, editors, and indexers looking for freelance work. Most of the time, all we can do is file the resume away and tell the freelancer that we’ll call if a suitable project comes up. But to be honest, that rarely happens. At the same time, we have a stable corps of perhaps 30 freelancers who do a ton of work for us every single month. These are folks who have successfully carved out viable careers working for themselves, and who make a living in a very difficult field.
So, what advice would I give to aspiring freelancers? Let me list some of the qualities we look for in a freelancer:
So, do all of our “regular” freelancers always excel in all 5 areas? No, not always. But they do reward us enough to keep their work dockets full. Admittedly, it’s very difficult to get your toe in the door as a freelancer. I wonder if any of our freelancers might care to comment on how to go about getting that toe in the door?
And I wonder if any of my staff would care to add to the list of qualities we look for in a freelancer? Let’s try to get some discussion going on this Schlagerblog!!!
A recent posting at the History News Network discusses the annual Gilder Lehrman Institute for history educators in New York City. Turns out that one of the seminars this summer, about the Gilded Age, was led by two members of the editorial board for the Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives, Karen Markoe and Ken Jackson. The writer has very high praise for the seminar and for Karen and Ken. We’ve been producing SEAL for Thomson Gale for several years now, and the series has been beautifully managed by Ken, Karen, and Karen’s husband, Arnold Markoe. It was Arnold who served as editor in chief for the newest volume, Volume 7, which will be published in October. Here is the publisher’s link for the new volume.
Alternative Energy, a three-volume title we produced for Thomson Gale’s UXL imprint, has been published. It features a very attractive design and, I hope, great content. Many thanks to the science team at Thomson Gale for their help in vetting and improving the manuscript.
My staff knows that I am fond of new technology–not gadgets so much as software. (That is not to say that I’m terribly adept with technical matters; I’m certainly not.) My newest favorite is NewsGator, which is an RSS aggregator and news reader. Essentially, it allows you to group all of your favorite blogs and/or news streams into a single interface, which you can then view on a website or even via email if you prefer. In my case, I have organized my NewsGator account into folders such as News, Publishing, Business, and Tennis. Then, within each category I have subscribed to various blogs and/or news streams that I particularly like. So, instead of reading my favorite blogs by going to multiple individual websites, I can do it all from this one site. (And the software is free, by the way.) I know this kind of thing is old hat to many people, but we all learn at our own pace, right? All of this works thanks to the magic of RSS feeds. The next software item I’d like to adopt is adding an RSS feed on the main Schlager Group home page that shows recent postings on the Schlager blog. I believe this is probably pretty simple, but I don’t know which software to use, nor how exactly to go about doing it. I’ll do some more investigation. (And if any of you can point me to a simple solution, by all means let me know.)
Well, I suppose it’s fitting that our final week in Fort Lauderdale has been interrupted by a tropical storm/hurricane! Ernesto is the latest annoyance (luckily, it’s looking like it will just be an annoyance, and nothing worse). We managed to ship our server out of Florida ahead of the storm, and over the next few days we’ll gradually get our operations back up and running in Dallas.
There has been some interesting industry news in the past few days. Google has announced an initial effort at offering a business software suite to compete with Microsoft Office. It only offers simple things like email, calendar, and chat so far, but I imagine they will offer other things (like a spreadsheet) before too long. (How about a true competitor to MS Access? That’s one thing I’d like to see….) Ebay and Google have announced a new partnership. And the New York Times has bought Baseline, a subscription database covering the entertainment industry.
A recent issue of American Libraries gave our friends at Lerner & Lerner a terrible review for their Real-Life Math title. This is the same book that got glowing reviews from other critics. It just goes to show that different readers (particularly critics) see different things, although rarely have I seen such wildly divergent opinions on the same book. For my part, the book seems like a valiant effort, and I hope we can work with Lerner & Lerner again soon. They’re good people who do good work.
As some of our writers and editors may know by now, Schlager Group is in the midst of relocating our offices from Fort Lauderdale to Dallas. In fact, I have just moved here myself, and am getting re-acquainted with the summer heat after an absence of about 20 years. (I went to college in Dallas.) Temps here have been around the 100 degree mark all of August, although it’s not as humid as in South Florida and thus doesn’t really feel any worse. The main office move will happen between about Sept. 1 and Sept. 8, so please bear with us through that period.
Some may wonder why we are moving the business again after only two years in Florida. Certainly, it’s not ideal to be moving so quickly (or at all). And in retrospect, if I had to do it over, we would never have made the pit stop in Florida. Of course, in the spring of 2004 we had know way of knowing that South Florida was on the verge of two consecutive, historic hurricane seasons. With experts now predicting that this trend will likely continue for another 10-20 years, and having learned some painful lessons about the woefully inadequate Florida power infrastrucure, we decided to get out while we could. Once the move is complete, we’ll settle back in and get back to work on our many projects for our various publishing partners–not to mention a few new projects of our own. One benefit of the move will be a new telephone system that allows our suppliers and customers to call one number to reach any Schlager Group employee, regardless of their location. Since we now have two employees who work from home full time, and will soon find ourselves spread out over three states, this will be a good thing.
Stay tuned for complete information on our new address, phone and fax numbers, and so forth. And thanks for your patience!
Thomson Gale continues to aggressively pursue selling its reference content direct to consumers through various websites. They have sold some of their literature content as e-book chapters on Amazon.com for some time now. Today I noticed that they are now selling individual Contemporary Authors entries on Amazon.com for $5.95 per entry. They are smart for pursuing this strategy; one wonders when other publishers will get in the game.