| Writing and Publishing for Library Professionals |
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| Written by Snow Scarmon |
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I would like to thank Abbey Zenith for the powerful and important message she shared with us in writing “Community Virtual Library: where do we go from here?” Like many of you, I have felt the frustration of trying to share even a little of the incredible work done by Second Life professionals with others, and I have trouble understanding how library professionals can dismiss the work done by other professionals without even looking. For me, professional development in virtual communities depends on peer-to-peer support from all of us in any way we can. I do not have the experience and talents of most of the information professional investing their time and effort but I can help toot the horn Abbey is talking about. I was able to attend the first meeting on Publishing for Library Professionals, and recorded the session to share with those unable to attend. ---Snow Scarmon Alexandria Knight: 20 Jul 2011 What, me? Publish?!! Why Not! (RL: Esther Grassian, Information Literacy Librarian, Retired, UCLA College Library This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )
Hi! It’s great to be here to talk with you about publishing We’re going to talk about… •The WHAT, WHY & HOW of publishing in various venues and formats. I’ll try to give you some tips based on my own experience… •First, WHAT to publish… Just about anything—opinions, advice, how-to, factual information, research, or literature reviews and analysis But…here’s the first tip: make sure you have something to say that interests your intended audience •Now—why publish? To make a statement or argument, rebut, agree with and to share with others So, here’s TIP 2: it’s important to check to see if anyone else has already published on your topic. If so, are you adding a new twist? updating previous research? commenting or critiquing something? •Ok, now for HOW… There are many ways to publish, some free and unmoderated, others highly moderated, edited and costly in many ways, including time—both yours and others. Here’s a kind of time-based/experience-based continuum Starting at the bottom will help you build confidence in writing and publishing, and will provide time for you to gain experience and expertise. Let’s start with FREE MEANS OF PUBLISHING •FaceBook or Google+ postings (your own & comments), tweets, blog posts and comments, listserv posts and responses, and some website authoring tools like Google Sites •Next—websites Has anyone seen or used LibGuides? It’s very popular software that allows you to create web pages easily, for many purposes, including course web pages, even if you don’t know any HTML. It’s an example of how you can publish something when you’re working at an institution, organization or company. An example is provided by the UCLA Library’s LibGuides: http://guides.library.ucla.edu/index.php. Now a caveat—if you use licensed software like LibGuides to create something and then you leave the institution that licenses it, you need to determine whether you can take the material you created with you, or whether it belongs to the institution. •Another link is to a FREE Google Sites website I created: http://www.springshare.com/libguides/, https://sites.google.com/site/teachinfolit/ It used to be a LibGuide I created, for teaching assistants, to help them learn how to incorporate information literacy into their curricula and assignments. But librarians have also been interested in it as a tool, so I put a lot of my instructional materials up on the site. When I retired, I moved all of the content to this new free site, as all UCLA Library webpages have a Creative Commons license on them: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. •Next… Poster Sessions. These provide a more informal way to publish, and sometimes a way to get feedback on work in progress. Usually, poster sessions take place for an hour or so during a conference. You have a space to mount a poster that visually illustrates and describes your work. You stand next to your poster, explain what it’s about, answer questions, and provide handouts or a URL. Many sites tell you how to create effective posters—just Google it. Conference presentations would be a next step up, with more stringent review; more selective. But again, they provide a good way to start publishing your work. It all starts with a call for proposals—usually the deadline for conference papers comes before the poster session deadline. If you present at a conference, they may publish your paper in the proceedings. •Then…Magazine articles, similar to those I’ve published in American Libraries and Change… Can you publish just anything you want to in magazines like these? No, although American Libraries does publish opinion pieces, as well as Letters to the Editor. So how do you get published in a magazine? Read some articles in magazines that interest you and don’t restrict yourself to library-related magazines. Check the magazine’s requirements for submission—Writer’s Market and the magazine’s own website are good starting points. Both will describe what the editors are looking for in terms of subject matter and if they pay for manuscripts—what a concept! Getting paid for your writing! But again, have something to say and base it upon something you’ve done, research, experienced, observed, or thought about. For my American Libraries article, I had a strong opinion and wanted to share my ideas; for Change, they asked me to write for them. Some publications will ask for an outline or a draft manuscript before agreeing to publish something. They may have requirements for length of manuscripts, how they want material submitted, to whom, when to submit and how long it will take them to get back to you with a decision. If they accept your manuscript, expect it to be edited and remember to retain the copyright! For Change I kept the copyright and was able to make the article freely available through the CDL’s eScholarship repository. •Now, have any of you thought about writing a book chapter? If you subscribe to listservs like ILI-L, the Information Literacy Listserv, you’ll see calls for people to submit proposals to write chapters for edited books. I’m working on a co-authored book chapter with Abbey right now on professional development in virtual worlds. If you submit a book chapter proposal, will it be accepted? It depends on the Editors, the pool of submissions, your qualifications to write, your topic, and the quality of your proposal. Book chapters are edited, but they aren’t peer-reviewed like many scholarly journal articles are. •Let’s talk about scholarly journals next… As you may know, some peer-reviewed journals are very stringent about the manuscripts they accept, while others are not. Whether or not journal articles are peer-reviewed, your article will probably be edited in some way. But remember that peer-reviewed journals publish more than just journal articles. They publish book reviews, editorials, opinion columns—these are all publishing opportunities. Again, find out what kind of content the journal is interested in. What are their requirements? How should you submit, to whom, in what format, and when? •Ok, on to books… How many of you think it would be crazy for you to even dream of writing and publishing a book? Well, I thought so too, and I’m still stunned by the fact that my co-author, Joan Kaplowitz, and I actually did it thrree times. Of course, you can self-publish any time and on almost any topic. But you can also publish by contracting with a commercial book publisher, though you need to have support, make a commitment and then stick to it. The first question to ask yourself about writing a book is: Is there a need for it? Joan Kaplowitz and I proposed an information literacy course to the UCLA iSchool in 1989, and began teaching it in 1990, first with a text by Anne Roberts, published in 1989, and then making do with readers for a number of years. So, after a few years there was a publishing gap there. We decided to try to fill that gap. We didn’t know at first that many publishers have detailed requirements for book proposals. Check the notecard for a list of what Neal-Schuman required of us in 1996. Other publishers may or may not require as much up front as Neal-Schuman does. Why did they agree to have us write a book? We had years of experience as instruction librarians, we’d successfully proposed and had been teaching a graduate course on the topic, and we demonstrated a great need, a publishing gap. The second book, Learning to Lead, wasn’t really our idea. We had too many chapters for the first book, so the editor took out four of our chapters and we added several others to create a second book. Then Neal-Schuman asked us to write a second edition of our first book. All of this took lots of time and support. For our firtst book we received an $8000 research grant from the Librarians Association of the University of California, plus three months off with pay. For the second book, neither of us got any time off or a grant. And for the second edition of our first book, Joan had retired, but there was no support at all for me. So, I spent all of my nights, weekends and holidays working on it for about three years. I have put a list of tips on book publishing on the notecard too. You could apply many of them to other kinds of publishing. We have talked about the what, why and how of publishing what I’ve called a publishing progression, based on practice and experience. I have tried to give you tips about publishing.
And now, I hope you’ll just try it! And please remember to join us on October 16th at 1 PM SLT on Info Island for a discussion on this and other topics on peer-to-peer support for professional development. |
