To wit: Lots of public libraries have mottoes or sayings on their websites (and probably elsewhere). Not all, by any means; I’d guesstimate 1/3, but that’s a NSWAG (non-scientific wild-ass guess).

Those mottoes are frequently interesting as tiny indications of what libraries are, or regard themselves as.

It might be fun and, I don’t know, uplifting to have a collection of these mottoes. I’m calling it “A library is…” for the moment, although I suspect only a minority of the sayings could be used to complete that statement.

If there’s interest, and if I get funding, preparing that collection could be an offshoot. It certainly wouldn’t be worth looking at all 9,000+ libraries (or the 8,000+, at a guess, that have websites) to find them, but if I was there anyway, capturing and organizing them would be a minor extra task.

Does this seem intriguing to anybody else? (Does the project in general seem intriguing to anyone else?)

If I try the Kickstarter route, A library is… would almost certainly be one of the thank-you items, especially since it could be offered at four or five different levels (PDF or EPUB or HTML; softcover book; autographed softcover book; hardcover book; autographed hardcover book).

Just another thought…

I’m delighted to say that The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing: Helping Patrons and Communities Use Free and Low-Cost Publishing Tools to Tell Their Stories is now available both in paperback (preorder for a few more days) from the publisher, Information Today, Inc. and in casewrap hardcover from Lulu, at 25% off today and tomorrow.

The paperback (I have my author’s copies, and it looks great!) is $49.50 (usual disclaimer: I have absolutely nothing to do with setting prices) but $37.13 on preorder sale.

The hardcover (it just became available yesterday, so i don’t have my copies yet) is $59.95, but for today and tomorrow you can use Lulu’s coupon code “ONEMORETHING” to save 25%, bringing it down to $45.

About the hardcover

The hardcover version does two things:

1. It makes a prebound version available for libraries that want a hardcover copy for circulation. I believe this book is going to be widely used by patrons at thousands of libraries. It’s a casewrap hardcover–that is, the cover design is part of the binding itself–so there’s no issue with laminating paper jackets.
2. It’s a proof of concept. This book is about producing attractive, high-quality books without spending any new money on software (assuming you have Word–or, although it’s more difficult, OpenOffice or LibreOffice). Part of the process of preparing the book was polishing a good general-purpose 6×9 (trade paperback/most hardbound) book template for Word, something that hasn’t been freely available. The book itself uses the template, with no special modification. And, other than the title pages/copyright page and the two ad pages at the back of the book, the body of the book is a PDF generated directly from Word2010, not using Adobe Acrobat. The same PDF is used for both paperback and hardcover–but the hardcover is itself a prime and pure example of what the book’s talking about, producing books in very small numbers without compromising on appearance or quality. The book walks the talk; the hardcover version is proof of that.

Who needs this book?

I’ve been saying that every public library (in the U.S. and in other English-speaking countries where Lulu offers its services or CreateSpace is available) needs this book. That’s probably a little grandiose, although the possibility of adding a new community/creative service to your patrons without any cost (other than a copy of the book), especially a service that speaks to long-form text, strikes me as worthwhile for even the libraries serving fewer than 100 people. (As part of my next book project, I’m now even more acutely aware of the sheer heterogeneity of America’s 9,000-odd public libraries: I’ve attempted to view the web pages of 5,958 of them. So far.)

So I’ll offer some examples of libraries that should specifically find this book more than worth the price. Oh, and it’s potentially useful for a number of academic and special libraries as well: More on that shortly.

• Libraries serving genealogists and family historians: You say there’s a link or tab on your homepage specifically dealing with genealogy? You need this book. Where there’s an amateur genealogist or a family historian, there’s a micropublished book waiting to appear: A book that will probably only be produced in a few or a few dozen copies but will be important to those families (and the local history group). Now that maybe half the libraries in the country are taken care of…
• Libraries with teen or adult writing classes or groups: You probably want to produce a collection at the end of a successful class or as part of a group’s cycle. You can do so without requiring capital at all, and it can look great. This book shows you how. Oh, and quite a few of those writers probably want a durable example of what they’ve done, their own book (possibly 24 pages of poems, possibly a 400-page epic) as a showpiece that might or might not morph into a major publication. This book shows them how–and, by the way, we’ve provided a special copyright exception so that, within reason, you can legally copy the chapters of this book they’ll need as they’re preparing their own books, as long as your library’s purchased one copy.
• Libraries serving local historians and historical societies: While family histories may be the most widespread examples of books that work best through micropublishing, there are also lots of local historians (and historical societies) out there who have manuscripts that deserve very short-run book publication and don’t especially want to spend a few $thousand to make that possible. With this book, all they need is Word (and not necessarily even that). Your library can be the center of this creative process that builds community.
• Libraries serving writers who aren’t part of a writing group: One great thing about micropublishing is that neither Lulu nor CreateSpace claim any intellectual property rights whatsoever. They’re not publishers; they’re service agencies. (The trivial exception: If you use their free ISBNs–and for Lulu, you don’t need to–then they’re the publisher of record for that edition. But the writer still owns the copyright and all rights in everything except those 13 digits.) With this book, those writers can get started with real books, handsome books–and if there’s enough interest, there’s nothing stopping them from taking it to a traditional publisher. (The library could create a great community service by finding ways for writers to swap editorial services, since the best editing and copyediting really does require other eyes than the writer’s.)
• I’m sure there are other cases I haven’t thought of here–but the ones listed here cover nearly every community, I suspect, including most of the smallest communities. Is there somebody in Whale Pass, Alaska (not quite the smallest LSA population at 31, but the smallest library that I know of with a Facebook page) who could benefit from this book? I wouldn’t be surprised…

Academic and special libraries

This book is primarily written for public libraries, but one chapter focuses on academic libraries and micropublishing, primarily discussing ejournals. To wit: If your academic library is getting into the open access ejournal business, aren’t there a few authors and libraries who would happily pay to see their work in book form? You can add an annual print edition (assuming the journal publishes less than 750 pages per year) with zero financial outlay or risk, although in this case you do need a copy of Acrobat. The book shows you how. Oh, by the way, at least one academic library is already using Lulu to build a virtual university press…and there will be more.

I know, I know, the patrons of special libraries and the libraries themselves have unlimited funds, so this money-saving technique isn’t relevant. (OK, you can stop laughing; I hope you didn’t choke in the process.) But maybe there are patrons of special libraries and even library projects where a book would be a great outcome–but you know there’s only need for one, five, or fifty copies, and you’re just about ready to go the ugly FedexKinko’s route. This book can show you how to do it better and, quite probably, a little cheaper as well.

That’s the story: The book’s out. I believe it’s the most universally applicable book I’ve ever written, the one that details a new service almost every library can usefully provide and the tools to make that service work. Without any cost to the library–other than the price of the book. What a deal!

A word or two about professional editing

I think I’m a pretty good nonfiction writer: a hack in the best sense of the term. For that matter, I think I’m a better than average self-editor, although that may be delusional.

Cites & Insights is self-edited. My self-published books have been self-edited.

But I’ll suggest that all of my editors–and over the past decades, I’ve dealt with quite a few–will tell you that I’m an easy writer to deal with because I know my writing can always stand improvement. (In practice, I don’t even go back to my original ms. when looking at a galley unless I spot a special problem: I read the galley on its own merits, assuming it represents an improvement over the original.)

This book was unusual because I was literally making all of the changes in the three full cycles and two or three minicycles of editing (line editing, copyediting, “proofreading”). I was sending ITI a PDF; they were returning the PDF with “stickies” (comments, which really do work a little like Post-Its) for editorial and proofreading suggestions. There were literally hundreds of such proposed changes (many of them as small as correcting my bad habit of overusing em dashes, one of them proposing a complete rewrite of a chapter). I had to evaluate each change, since I was the only one who could actually make the changes.

I believe I made 99% of the proposed changes, maybe more. I know the book is the better for the cycles of professional editing it received from John B. Bryans, Amy Reeve and Brandi Scardilli (and possibly others whose names I’ve forgotten). I know the book is better for M. Heide Dengler’s advice and cooperation in refining the book template–professional advice that’s reflected in the free .dotx, .dot and .odt templates available for book buyers to use and modify. And, to be sure, the book benefits from professional indexing; in that case, I’m not a hack so much as a talentless hack, so I really appreciate the quality of the index. (They sent the index to me as a Word document, so I just imported it into the manuscript before using the “Save and Send button to prepare the final PDF.) And, of course, I anticipate considerable benefit from the professional marketing skills of Rob Colding.

(I should also thank Robin Hastings, James LaRue and Maurice Coleman for the excellent blurbs they provided after seeing the unedited version of the book. As soon as I receive my hardcover copies, their autographed copies will be on their way…)

So there it is. It’s a book I’m proud of, a book I believe thousands of libraries can benefit from, to the benefit of their patrons and communities. Go buy it. Oh, and I’m available to talk about micropublishing or hold workshops…for a fee.

This year, I decided to track the reading, partly because I (ahem) picked up a book at the library that I’d already read, six months or so earlier, and really didn’t want to do that again. Also because I thought it might be interesting, if sad, to keep track of just how little I was likely to read during 2011.

Just how little?

Yep. Because I knew I was going to write two books from start to finish and do a substantial amount of research and early writing toward the third one, and because I assumed I’d keep doing Cites & Insights and at least one magazine column, I figured I’d be lucky to manage 39 books during the year–more likely 26 or so.

The “39″ number isn’t arbitrary. Livermore Public has a four-week/28-day loan period for books (except for “7-day books,” which I assume are brand-new books; I’ve never encountered that shorter period). I normally pick up three books: one genre (alternating mystery and sf/f), one fiction (“non-genre”) and one nonfiction. I like to read across quite a few disciplines, and I sometimes really like books that are technically outdated.

The math: there are 13 four-week periods in a year. 13 times 3 is 39. If this year was as crazed as I expected, I’d drop back to two books per visit or start renewing books.

The reality

This surprised me. The total for the year–I’m assuming I’m not going to finish the book that’s on the coffeetable before Sunday–is 63.

That’s partly because I read a number of books related to publishing and editing as background and resources for The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing. It’s partly because I read a few items as background for the other books.

It’s mostly, I think, because with one book (and only one book) sitting there on the coffee table, I’d tend to pick it up after a few days–and in most cases I’d enjoy it enough to keep going. I never work on the computer after 8:30 p.m. or so, and rarely do any actual work after supper, so there’s always some reading time (since we typically watch 42 minutes to an hour of TV each night, other than Movie Saturday).

What’s suffered, clearly, has been magazine reading: I love magazines, and I take quite a few of them, but I’m also about 2.5 months behind on most of them. My current “to be read” basket has 24 regular magazines and nine science fiction magazines…and that’s about typical. They’ll all get read, cover to cover (yes, I’m one of those), but it takes time.

That really means I’ve read a lot more than 63 book-equivalents in print form. One science fiction magazine (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) has gone to thick bimonthly issues that are effectively a book’s worth of fiction in each issue. The others are theoretically monthly, with a little more than half a book’s worth in each issue, but in each case four monthly issues appear as two fat booklength combos. So I get 26 issues a year in all, and that’s about 18 book equivalents. (I’m probably 15 years behind on science fiction/fantasy in book form, but I’m in pretty good shape for short-story and novelette/novella writers.)

The details?

I’m not going to post the actual list of titles. It’s eclectic. I will say that. A couple of summary notes:

• One book came from ALA as support for a book I’m working on. One was a gift from the author. Two–the only two I abandoned partway through–were old paperbacks that had been hanging around the house for many years (one of them I picked up on an “exchange table” at MFPOW; the other my wife read a few decades ago). The others all came from Livermore Public Library.
• I count 16 “mainstream” fiction titles, 10 that the library categorizes as mystery (most of them from Nevada Barr’s series set in national parks), 29 called nonfiction, and eight categorized as science fiction/fantasy. Plus, to be sure, the 18 book equivalents of science fiction/fantasy in shorter form.
• I found 25 of the books less than enchanting–nine “Meh,” five “No” (including the two I abandoned), two “OK” and nine “So-so.” In most of these cases, I should probably have abandoned the book at the Pearl Limit (in my case, 34 pages in), but I find that hard to do except in the worst cases. That leaves 38 books that I enjoyed, including ten that I liked a lot and 13 more that I liked almost as much. That’s a pretty good track record, given the modified randomness with which I choose books.

So there it is. A little more than a book a week–basically, a book every six days. Essentially, I’ve been going to the library roughly every 2.5 weeks instead of every four weeks.

I’ll keep keeping track–printing out a tiny-print list is a good way of avoiding duplicates (it will be quite a while before that list requires more than one sheet of paper every three or four weeks, so I’m not exactly squandering natural resources).

(Is this post another form of procrastination? Sort of. I finished a wholly revised draft of the second of nine chapters for my next book,  one of two chapters that’s almost entirely new material since I set aside the partial first draft to add another 3,500+ libraries to the dataset, so I’m in good shape. Lots of metrics processing today, but I might hold off on Chapter 3 until Monday. Sunday’s our 34th anniversary, and I don’t plan to work on the book at all… Meantime, happy new year, and if you’re around these parts, “avoid the 21″–don’t drive under the influence. Well, the advice holds everywhere, but the 21 police agencies in the Bay Area make a concerted effort over the holidays, with some success in lowering DUI-related accidents.)

I also revisited 20 libraries where people contributed comments, three months after the first visit.

Combined with the 3,555 libraries in 13 states who only get a single visit (at least for this project), I’m now done done done with the actual research for my book.

Tomorrow: A day off (hiking in the morning, reading & watching an old movie in the afternoon).

Thursday: Starting in on refreshed and new metrics for the 13 states and the changes in 25 states, and rethinking the book (about 80% of which was written, and most of that will be rewritten).

Done done done. With that phase, that is.

And, to be sure, contemplating the fact that very little of the data I’ve gathered will be used in the book… But that’s gist for another post or three.

Although a couple of those posts combine progress reports with other things–in one case, the second part of my probably-two-part Relevance and Reward, in another case some notes on the “computer game” I actually play…

Wisconsin done

More reporting libraries/library agencies than any state I’d surveyed before–381 of them in all. And almost all of them with web pages (certainly not true for every state). Probably just finished in time: Twitter’s now showing me Wisconsin tourism ads for every search that includes the word “wisconsin.”

The decision

I’m now at the point where I was going to make a decision on just how much I’d expand the original survey of 25 states and slightly more than 2,400 libraries (but more than half of the people).

The eleven states I’ve done now add another 2,537 libraries–which means I’ve now checked more than half of the 9,000-odd public libraries (not physical locations, but reporting entities) in the U.S.

There are two more states I could reasonably survey (the rows are in my spreadsheet but not yet checked): Pennsylvania and Texas. Each of which has a whole bunch of reporting libraries–1,014 between the two of them.

If I stop now, I’ve covered 72% of the states, just about two-thirds of the population, and around 55% of the libraries.

If I add PA and TX, I’ll have covered 76% of the states…but also about 80% of the population and about two-thirds of the libraries. Pennsylvania and Texas combined have almost as much population as the 11 states I just finished surveying…

As very populous states with lots of independent libraries, they also add to the incredible diversity of the states I’ve included (although Massachusetts also fits in this category); California and Florida have relatively few–or at least fewer–reporting library agencies. (New York is one of the dozen states that just isn’t going to be part of this survey, both because of time and because the state library doesn’t show a spreadsheet of library names and LSAs on its statistics website. Illinois and Michigan are also in that group.)

The book really doesn’t need the extra data, but having it will add a little more richness to the picture.

So, well, I’m 99% certain I’ll continue with those two. Not that it matters.

Except….

That I’m formulating a newer “ideal job” picture, one that might be worth posting. I don’t know that it has any more real-world chances than other pipe dreams, but it might be worth fleshing out. Maybe in another post, before or after a stub issue of C&I (yes, I think there will be another 2011 issue; no, I don’t think it will be a substantial one).

How many more Facebook pages and Twitter accounts have I surfaced this time around? Dunno; I haven’t done any analysis of the 11 states. “A bunch” would be one fair summary, as would “certainly not present in nearly all libraries”–but that’s nothing new.

The same message, on each page. I’ve seen it already half a dozen times this morning, and probably at least two dozen over the past few days. Currently, I’m seeing it in Wisconsin libraries, but that’s because those are the libraries I’m looking at–there is nothing in the message specific to Wisconsin, as far as I can tell.

Paraphrasing…

Without quoting the message directly, it’s a pitch for a new book, posted by the author; the book is related to the Human Genome Project, supposedly in plain language, and published by Xlibris (a PoD house that charges several hundred to several thousand dollars in advance, making it a vanity press by my standards).

The message is identical on every Facebook wall. It’s either attached as a comment on some library post (none of which have anything to do with the HGP) or offered as a standalone comment, presumably on pages where that’s easy to do.

I’m doing this post for two reasons–and will link to it in a message on Publib and Web4lib for both reasons:

1. If you’re an administrator for a public library Facebook page and you see this message and wonder what it’s all about: You’re not alone. It’s popping up all over the place. It’s not specific to your library, although I suppose it’s indirectly arguing that you should buy the book. If you choose to treat it as spam and delete it, you’re probably making a sensible choice. (By the way, for libraries whose Facebook pages are largely inactive: Do you check them once in a while to delete the make-big-money-at-home spam that pops up on such pages?)
2. A tiny little part of me wonders whether what this author is doing could be considered legitimate self-promotion? That tiny little part notes that I’ll have a book–from Information Today, Inc., definitely not self-published–out early in 2012 that is directly relevant to every public library and its relations with its community. Should I be posting a notice about that book to every public library Facebook page? Even more interesting: The reason I’m looking at all these Facebook pages is the other book I’m working on, which should be out later in 2012 from ALA Editions–and I suppose you could make the case that it would be directly relevant for me to post something on each and every public library Facebook page (that I’m aware of) about the book. After all, the Facebook pages are the major basis for the study, and the book will allow libraries to see how their Facebook page compares to their peers.

Don’t worry: I have no intention of doing either one. It strikes me as inappropriate and maybe a little unsavory. But I’ve always been a terrible self-promoter, and maybe I’m wrong here. What do you think?

Rhode Island crossed off. Next up: Virginia, also a reasonably small set of libraries (91 of them).

Nothing more to say: A short progress report for a small state.

And, given that this library appears as “YOUNGSTOWN AND MAHONING COUNTY, PL OF” in the spreadsheet, that’s the last Ohio library–a few days after Ada Public School District Library started it out.

Ohio went a little faster than expected because most (but certainly not all!) Ohio libraries have websites and most (but certainly not all!) of the libraries with social network accounts (which might or might not be a majority of the libraries–not doing that sort just yet) have icons on the homepages that link to those accounts. That makes it faster, and “encouraging” searches (those that yield results) keep me going longer between breaks.

Good luck with the levies

It’s abundantly clear, doing this sweep between November 5 and 8, that a fair number of Ohio libraries are going out for tax levies. I’ll assume (and hope!) that these libraries have engaged their communities and been strong enough contributors that they’ve made the case for financial support. Good luck to all of you in passing the levies.

Next up, Rhode Island, and with only 47 libraries to check, I should finish that today and move on to Virginia. Interleaving that with continued work on the first 2/3 of the manuscript, based on the first 25-state survey, to be sure. And maybe, just maybe, an entirely different post.

Meanwhile, if you’re in Ohio, go vote. Or, for that matter, if you have local elections (not everybody does, as some offyears in some places don’t have any contested positions), go vote–if you have an opinion and know what or who you’re voting for [or in some cases against]. I certainly will.

Since I was looking at New Hampshire public libraries this week–following a major weather situation–I was reminded once again that most public libraries, even (or especially) the smallest, really do serve as centers of their communities.

Now on to Ohio–just one more library/library agency than New Hampshire, but roughly nine times as many people, so I’m guessing the patterns will be different once more.

When, in the first part of the manuscript (devoted to the initial 25 states), I discuss possible regional bias, I noted that–at the time–the Northeast wasn’t very well represented (including New England). Now that I’ve added Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, and will definitely add Rhode Island and Vermont (and probably Pennsylvania), that won’t be true for the larger set of results.

Hmm. I also turned around the fifth revision of The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing (to take into account proofreader’s notes and another round of copyediting). So I guess it hasn’t been a wasted week. (By the way, the people in Information Today, Inc.’s book division are not only a pleasure to work with but excellent at what they do. The fifth revision of the book is significantly better than the first submitted version, as I anticipated it would be.)

As for C&I…still no writing, still no urgency. I should do the second part of the Relevance and Reward series of posts..maybe soon.

Update Sunday, November 6, 2011: Partway through Ohio, I’m realizing that I really would like it to be the case that nearly all PLs have FB pages and Twitter accounts–it’s faster for me (than attempting to be satisfied that they don’t), and it’s a lot more fun to look at how PLs use social networks than whether they use them.

(The first 16 Ohio PLs–alphabetically–all have Facebook accounts. The string runs out there, although I continue to see a healthy percentage. Even there, only half of those 16 have obvious working links to their Facebook pages on their homepages.)

And I’ve gone far enough to see that, while Multnomah has the most Likes of any public library in the first 25 states surveyed, it’s definitely not the most of any PL in the nation (nor, as far as I know, does it claim that distinction). Columbus Metropolitan has more than half again as many Likes. But then I checked a library that won’t be in the expanded survey–New York just doesn’t have the downloadable spreadsheet of library names and LSAs–and there it is: NYPL’s primary Facebook page has more than 42,000 Likes. Is that the highest? If not, I’m sure someone will let me know what library has even more.

Massachusetts down…

I’m currently interleaving work on the draft text for Libraries in Social Networks (working title, from ALA Editions, some time next year with luck) with work on expanding my survey of actual public library presence on Facebook or Twitter from the current 25 states and 2,406 libraries to a total of 38 states and 5,957 libraries (or, if energy runs out, 36 states and 4,963 libraries).

I’m doing the remaining 13 states (all of them I hadn’t already done and that have readily-available spreadsheets of library names and population served) in alphabetic order–except that, regarding the parenthetic note in the previous paragraph, I’ve now moved Pennsylvania and Texas to the end, since those are the two with the largest number of reporting libraries.

I’d already done Alabama and Indiana. A few minutes ago, I finished Massachusetts (and the first three libraries in Maine, since I stopped at a “20 multiple” convenient spot).

Which means I’ve looked at the websites and other evidence of social networks for all the public libraries, memorial libraries, free libraries, incorporated public library associations, city libraries, town libraries, just plain libraries, reading rooms, citizens’ libraries, social libraries, athenaea (what’s the plural of athenaeum?)…and, last but not least, the Young Men’s Library Association in Ware, which has both Facebook and Twitter accounts. I’ve even managed the cases where two libraries in two different communities have exactly the same name (I think there were three of those), with a little help from Wikipedia.

Now on to Maine (and Chapter 5)

So now I’ll start in on Chapter 5 of the text…and interleave that with Maine’s libraries. (Odd coincidence: The number of reporting libraries/library systems in Maine is exactly the same as the number in Nebraska, which will come next. Whereas the numbers for New Hampshire and Ohio, the next two after that, differ by one.)

And that’s the news from South Livermore…in the heart of one of California’s lesser-known (but also one of the earliest) wine countries.