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.
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.