You may remember that in December, Wikipedia launched a fundraising drive. In the new issue of Reference and User Services Quarterly, its editors (Connie Van Fleet and Danny P. Wallace) have written an interesting summary of Wikipedia’s purpose, methods, sources, authors, and so forth. On the fundraising front, they note the following: “A $161,200 budget shortfall at the beginning of the fourth quarter of 2005 suggests that the future of Wikipedia may be in question if donations are not forthcoming.” A page on Wikipedia’s site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2006-01-09/Fundraiser_ends) describes the results of the most recent fundraising drive and provides a glimpse of the financial challenges involved in running such a huge enterprise without any ongoing revenue stream. It will be interesting to see if the general public–and various foundations–step forward with enough money to keep Wikipedia operating under its current model.
One of the most interesting publishing experiments of the past several years has been the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This open access, web-based resource (http://plato.stanford.edu/) is written, edited, vetted, and updated for free by volunteer scholars. The project is hosted by Stanford University, which has partnered with various other nonprofit/educational/library organizations to try to build an endowment for the encyclopedia so that it can maintain its publishing model and remain free of charge. If you go to the website, you will see an appeal for contributions by university libraries at institutions that offer degrees in philosophy. One wonders if this is the future of scholarly publishing, a one-time sideshow, or something in the middle.
Thomson Gale has created an interesting website to further market/sell its business and company data direct to consumers. It’s called Goliath (http://goliath.ecnext.com/). Users can buy individual articles for a modest fee (e.g., $29.95 for a single company profile), or they can purchase one of a number of monthly subscription plans. The site contains ads via Google’s adwords program. Smart. They have not yet profiled Schlager Group for their company profiles series, but we hope to get big enough so that one day they will!
Got an email earlier this week from a former contributor, Judson Knight, who contributed to many of our publications (or wrote them outright, e.g. the Science of Everyday Things) before joining his wife, Deidre, full time in operating her literary agency, The Knight Agency. We were sorry to lose Judson’s talents, but he has obviously gone on to great things with the Knight Agency (http://www.knightagency.net/). Judson has his own blog at http://www.judsonknight.blogspot.com/, and the Knight Agency has a separate blog at http://www.knightagency.blogspot.com/. One of Deidre and Judson’s agents, Nephele Tempest, also writes for Contemporary Authors, which we produce. Take a look at their blogs/website for a perspective on another corner of the publishing world.
School librarians are alarmed at a new effort to require that school districts dedicate 65 percent of their operating budgets to in-classroom instruction. It sounds like a good idea at first glance, so why the concern? According to the group pushing this initiative, libraries are classified as outside the classroom entities. (But sports, arts education, and school field trips are “in-classroom.”) The new issue of School Library Journal has a good summary (http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6302207.html) of the initiative and the conservative group behind it.
The new issue of Library Journal has a good review of the new edition of the Encyclopedia of the Ancient Greek World, which we produced for Facts On File. The review discusses our title as well as a new title on the same subject from Routledge that is aimed at an academic audience.
A couple of years ago, we handled the copyediting for Oxford University Press’s African American Lives. Co-edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Evelyn Higginbotham, the book is a straightforward biographical reference source that features entries on notable African Americans. Now, Gates has partnered with PBS on a four-part documentary, also titled African American Lives (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aalives/index.html). The documentary is not really a companion piece to the book. Rather, it follows a handful of prominent African Americans as they attempt to trace their ancestries. The New York Times has given the show a glowing review (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/arts/television/01heff.html), calling it “the most exciting and stirring documentary on any subject to appear on television in a long time.”
At ALA Midwinter, Ebsco announced a new visual search component to its EbscoHost databases. Ebsco is a content aggregator (not dissimilar to Gale’s Virtual Reference Library), and its EbscoHost product is quite popular. The new search component is via Groxis, which allows users to see search results in a graphical display. You can read a Library Journal announcment about this at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6302814.html.