To my great pleasure, I was invited to give three speeches during the 2013 Oregon & Washington Library Association(s) Annual Conference (the two states hold combined conferences in some years, separate ones in some years—I’ve spoken at two other WaLA conferences but never at OrLA). The three speeches—actually one workshop and two speeches—were related to Open Access: What You Need to Know Now (the workshop), The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing and Give Us a Dollar and We’ll Give You Back Four. As part of the agreement, I prepared a special edition of Give Us a Dollar… focusing on Oregon and Washington libraries and, unlike the original book, combining commentary, graphs and tables.
The special edition appeared as a free PDF (after all, the associations were paying an honorarium and expenses) and a hardcover 70-page color book: Color because some of the graphs needed color for easy reading (although you could make sense of them in b&w), hardcover because the production cost was already going to be so high. I assumed that a handful of libraries might find the hardcover worth having, but that most libraries and librarians would pick up the PDF—which, after all, could be printed out fairly cheaply on a color printer, and if you did it reduced about 7% to 5.5″ x 8.5″, it would fit four pages to a sheet.
I think it’s a neat little book. Doing something similar for later data for any other state or group of states would be feasible; so far, that hasn’t happened.
For the cover design (PDF and hardcover), I tried something that I think worked very well; I’ve since used the same technique for three other books (coming later). To wit, I made a mosaic wraparound strip for the top of the cover and another one for the bottom of the cover (wraparound only for the hardcover, since the PDF only has one cover page), each strip made up of images taken from library websites (or in some cases Facebook pages), deliberately using images from a range of library sizes.
As usual, I enjoyed the conference a lot. Vancouver (the Washington State one, across the river from Portland) was nice; I was able to do some fairly long walks, including one to Fort Vancouver; the people were interesting; the talks went reasonably well.
There were seventeen downloads of the free PDF ebook. I apparently own the only copy of the hardcover book. Such is life.
Crawford, Walt. Give Us a Dollar and We’ll Give You Back Four: Oregon and Washington Library Benefits and Spending. 2013.
