I couldn’t help linking to this fascinating post at the History News Network about the so-called Tokyo Rose. The woman purported to be Tokyo Rose, Iva Toguri, died earlier this week. But HNN says the Tokyo Rose connection is entirely fabricated. Interesting stuff.
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.
Over the weekend I caught up on some back issues of e-Content magazine. The July/August issue had an interesting column by David Meerman Scott called “Fearing Content Cannibalization.” He wrote the following:
“The fact is that smart publishers know the name of the game is offering different slices of the same content via multiple distribution channels and marketing each one to the particular buyers within that channel. For example, a market research company might offer yearly subscriptions to a series of full reports for $10,000. The same company might sell one-off reports via an online store found on the company’s website for $500 each, while micro-content parts of that report, say, a table or graph, might be sold via an SEO site for a few dollars apiece.”
That’s very astute analysis, and something that I know many reference publishers are taking to heart (and, in some cases, acting on). As we begin thinking about how to create our own proprietary content, we would do well to keep this in mind.
This is a quick post to get us registered on Technorati.
Technorati Profile
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.)
While browing the latest issue of School Library Journal, I came across an ad by Grolier for some of its new and upcoming reference books. These include titles like Amazing Animals, Diseases, World War II, and Hispanic American Biographies. These appear to be fine volumes, and in fact some of them are in their second or third edition. What I’m about to say is not meant as a criticism of these titles. But seeing this ad got me thinking, once again: How can reference publishers possibly survive by continuing to offer the same old titles in the same old ways? Doesn’t it seem as if every single major publisher has an animal life encyclopedia, or an encyclopedia of diseases, or a Latino biographies set? Certainly, there are probably variations in each publisher’s offerings. Some offer broader or deeper coverage, some aim for a lower price point, some are designed more for high school students while others are pitched at a slightly older or younger audience, etc. etc. But still, my question remains. One part of me wonders if established publishers and libraries aren’t locked in a co-dependent death spiral. The publishers keep pumping out the same tried-and-true volumes at high prices; libraries still buy them, though in lesser quantities all the time. Meanwhile, actual researchers, be they students or interested adults, increasingly bypass the publisher-library model to find their own way via the Internet. Thus, another part of me is furiously working to find a direction that allows Schlager Group to survive and thrive in this new online world. I know this old vs. new paradigm is somewhat simplistic, as I’ve blogged many times about the ways in which existing reference publishers are reaching outside the box and working just as furiously to come up with new ways to deliver their information. But it will be very interesting to see which companies survive–and in which way–and which companies fall away.
Google has launched yet another new service, this time integrating historical data from numerous newspaper and periodical publishers as well as library reference publishers including Thomson Gale. It’s called Google News Archive Search, and the ACRL blog has a very interesting overview of it. (See here.) The upshot is that this is yet another effort by Google and traditional publishers to have their proprietary content show up in regular Google searches; in this case, users may see search results that include articles that can only be accessed for a fee. One comment in response to the ACRL blog (see the very bottom of the blog) expresses some anger at companies like Thomson Gale, who are charging users of Google search a per-article or subscription fee for something that the user’s library community (in this case, an academic library) already has purchased access to. The comment writer calls this “double-dipping.” The blog writer also discusses the obvious concern on the part of libraries that such services will eventually make libraries obsolete. As someone on the content delivery side of the equation, I completely understand a publisher’s interest in selling its data in as many places, and in as many ways, as possible. With sales of traditional library reference books flat or falling, publishers have to find a way to make money; only in that way can they continue to create new content. That’s not to say that I don’t sympathize with librarians on this issue. I love libraries and don’t want to see them made obsolete any more than librarians themselves do. One would think that down the road, there would be a way, technologically speaking, for users of this Google search service and other similar ones to be warned when accessing articles that those articles are already available to them for free via their “home” library system. Perhaps the onus is on libraries to make such advances themselves, as a way of maintaining their relevance, or perhaps it’s something that can be a partnership between libraries and content providers.
WorldCat (a library database tool) has released a beta program with Google that lets users find items in any library by doing a simple web search. Even better, they’ve created a search bar that anyone can add to his/her website. I’ve added the bar to the Schlager Group home page, so now users can search their local library systems (or any library system, for that matter) to find specific books or CDs or what not. Try it. It’s a great tool, and it’s fun!