The aim of the book

Are you a librarian in a public, special, school, academic or national library? Perhaps you are a student who plans to work in one of these kinds of libraries, or a publisher who has an opportunity to cooperate with libraries and librarians on a publishing project. If any of these is true, then this book is for you. We wrote it to talk about publishing, and not just publishing in general, but publishing in and by libraries. So, this book is also about libraries and librarians, as without their efforts there would be no libraries or library publishing. Its aim is to professionalise the role of libraries in publishing and to teach the reader how to publish professionally. In essence, this book is intended for staff at managerial levels within libraries and teaching institutions. It will provide librarians with the know-how essential for successful accomplishment of publishing projects. It is also intended for library and information science students at graduate and postgraduate levels as a learning tool they can use to find out why publishing is a library function and how to approach it so the end result is a publication (print or electronic) that is valuable to their current and future users. The book can also be used in various publishing workshops for professionals, and all others who participate in the publishing process.

By ‘publishing’ we mean the process of production and dissemination of publications in print or electronic form. ‘Publisher’ is a person or a company engaged in publishing. To explain what a publication is, we take Borgman’s definition (Borgman, 2007: 48), which states that ‘publication occurs when a document is “made public” with an intention that it be read’. Therefore, we are talking about a process and about a product as a result of the process.

Publishing? Isn’t publishing a publisher’s job, and why should librarians learn about it?

Libraries have always been publishers – they issue a variety of publications, such as library catalogues, bibliographies, monographs, scientific papers, exhibition catalogues, periodicals and library operation reports. Libraries publish in print and electronic format. They create, edit, design and distribute the work, which they in turn use to communicate with their readers. We believe that in many libraries there is a lack of awareness about what percentage of library activities are related to library publishing. Creating and using library websites are making this even more apparent today. With the widespread use of the Internet, libraries’ web pages are real publishing projects. But in many cases libraries lack the basic publishing principles in print as well as in digital publishing environments.

This book is intended as a guide that will enable librarians to take on successful publishing projects, help them avoid professional mistakes that may be damaging to the library’s public image and possible cause of financial loss, equip managers with the skills for supervising the core publishing process and provide practical solutions to real-life work challenges. This does not mean that all libraries should take on the role of a publisher, but librarians are expected to be familiar with the basics of publishing in order to be able to organise a publishing process within their library and to know how to outsource parts of it. Following the set procedures can save time and money, and what is even more important, it ensures delivery of the desired publication on time and with envisioned content.

Background

Where do books come from? Is buying a book the same as going to any store and purchasing a desired product? What kind of a ‘book’ is a library’s web page? How is it created? What are the ties between publishers and libraries? Is there a theory of library publishing? What about the questions of the future of print and of libraries? For those of us who work in the library and information field, times are indeed interesting. Due to rapid changes in this field, a great number of questions are raised daily. On the other hand, librarians and publishers have to keep their libraries steadily running and services improving as the users are ever more demanding. The convergence caused by the development of digital and virtual worlds is providing these two professions with immense opportunities as well as responsibilities. These responsibilities are complex and have influence on the future of humanity. Librarians and publishers have a say in creating our future as they have the ability to strongly affect the world of our ideas – we are what we think! Furthermore, users are no longer passive recipients of service; they are also active creators. Nevertheless, in a way, readers have always had an influence on publishing production because acceptance or rejection of printed works was a message to authors and publishers. Literary criticism and scientific reviewing are also forms of feedback from a reader to a publisher. In fact, aside from messengers in the Greek and Roman times, there has never been a way to react instantly to what was said to the audience. This postponed response we considered (or perhaps still consider) an advantage of print. And really, it still might be a good idea to think something over and then react. Interactive library websites do it differently; they enable users to instantly make comments and additions to the published data and photographs.

The complexity of the relationship between publishers and libraries arises from the simple fact that whatever enters a library collection is a publishing product, and nowadays every library product is a publication because it is publicly accessible. Here again users are an important driving force. Librarians have accepted it: libraries are for users. Donald Urquhart, a British librarian, was the first to state this clearly in his principles (Urquhart, 1981). Publishers must publish for readers. This means at least two things: librarians and publishers must know their readers well so that the published materials will respond to their needs and interests. Also, they have to consider how the published materials will reach the intended audience.

The authors of this book are of the opinion that the relationship between librarians and publishers should be closer than it is today, and that the digital environment creates new opportunities for cooperation, not for its own sake, but for the benefit of users. If librarians understand the basic publishing principles, their products will be better suited to their patrons – readers. If publishers understand the user-oriented philosophy of librarianship, their products will have a larger market. For this reason this book is intended for librarians who want to understand publishing and intend to be publishers themselves. ‘Library publishing is the new hot topic,’ stress Bankier and Smith (2008: 3), and they support this with examples of reports published in the past few years that show libraries’ emerging role as publishers.

In the report Research Library Publishing Services conducted by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), Hahn (2008) gives the results of analyses focused on libraries’ production of journals and monographs in print or electronic or both forms. Out of 80 responding libraries, 44 per cent were delivering publishing services and 21 per cent were planning to do that. They mostly publish journals (88 per cent of respondents), conference papers and proceedings (71 per cent) and monographs (71 per cent). It is interesting that publishing services in those libraries are not treated as isolated units (as university press units might be) but as a part of other services, such as, for example, digital repository. The author points out that ‘there is an emerging consensus that some sort of basic publishing services will become a core service for research libraries’ (Hahn, 2008: 27). Librarians in the libraries with publishing services have a certain advantage over publishers: they are more familiar with the needs of the readers as they interact with them daily. Librarians have their fingers on the pulse of readers’ needs, they can identify the issues that perhaps other publishing systems cannot recognise, they have the infrastructure – technology, staff expertise and partner relationship, they are able to reallocate existing resources, etc.

Moreover, many librarians are also authors. They are surrounded by a lot of reading materials and resources that they can use as inspiration for creating either professional publications or literary work. Some of that work is published by libraries. The book Writing and Publishing: The librarian’s handbook (Smallwood, 2010) collects 47 accounts by librarians who write about their experiences in various roles of the publishing process, such as authoring different types of work, reviewing or editing.

All of this points to the need for librarians to be familiar with the publishing process as they can easily find themselves in the role of authors of a manuscript, facilitators of a publishing process, editors or other experts in the publication production, or all of the above.

Organisation of the book

This book is organised in nine chapters. After the introduction, an overview of the history of publishing – from scrolls to electronic publications – is given in Chapter 2. Our intention is to give a brief historic review because today’s publishing leans on the historic forms, merges them with new ones and reveals new ways of publishing. Chapter 3 concentrates on many different aspects of the close relations between publishing, libraries and technology in order to explain the influence technology has on library publishing. Special attention is given to the technological development brought about by the introduction of computers into publishing and libraries. This development caused a gradual rise in library publishing activities as a consequence of the increased presence of new technologies that enabled librarians to master the knowledge and skills needed in the e-environment. This made libraries better equipped to fulfil their missions regarding more effective service to their users. Also explained are the reasons for e-transition in publishing. E-transition changes publications as well, so its influence to the convergence of media is explained. This convergence has provoked an e-shift in library services, including stronger publishing activities. In today’s networked society, collaboration is not only an opportunity but a necessity. Partners contribute expertise, funding or whatever else might be their strength, while the gains are mutual.

In Chapter 4 the publishing fields are described, the term ‘publishing capital’ is explained and library publishing is placed between trade and non-commercial publishing. Libraries never publish for commercial purposes, though this does not mean that they cannot make a profit and invest it into new projects. The comparison of publishing capital between publishers and libraries shows that libraries have strong publishing capital, which explains their great potential in publishing projects. One of the strongest aspects of libraries’ publishing capital is the librarians who are experts in numerous areas. Their expertise depends on their type of library. The fact is that libraries have always published, and today still, the variety of publications produced by libraries require that a librarian be well versed in publishing. First and foremost that means being familiar with the publishing process, its phases and dynamics. For this reason, Chapter 5 explains the steps of the publishing process. It describes the production of a professionally edited publication in accordance with a library’s mission statement. Included are the main elements of a publishing plan: the timetable and the financial plan as prerequisites for publishing on time and within budget. This chapter is written in such a way that the steps described can be applied to both print and electronic publishing. An overview of the professions involved in publishing production follows in Chapter 6. The experts’ contributions result in added value, which is an outcome of a publishing venture. Emphasis is placed equally on the descriptions of each profession as well as on their interdepencence. Each profession is described separately but it is clear that individual tasks can be combined and that one person can do more than one similar job, e.g. graphic editing and design, or language editing and proofreading. Finally, we explain the professional and social role of the statement of responsibility from the viewpoint of an author, a publisher and a reader.

Not all libraries are the same as they do not all publish the same kinds of books, so the publishing tasks are different in each library. For these reasons, in Chapter 7 we start with the basic distinction between national, university and research, special, school and public libraries and then we explain what kind of a publication is likely to be produced in each of these kinds of library. Here we also describe characteristics of an infrastructural phenomenon – the digital library, which is a publishing venture in itself. The emphasis is on research and university libraries because they have been going through a radical change during recent decades. In these libraries publishing used to be a marginal activity, whereas now publishing activities are some of the more important ones, especially in the digital environment. Repositories of scientific and educational papers open up new frontiers for these libraries, as through them libraries can better fulfil their primary missions. Librarians also publish outside of their libraries, sometimes through various international, regional and national library associations or associations of specific types of libraries. Chapter 8 explains the basis of co-publishing, the formal regulation of relations between co-publishing partners, some advantages (and possible disadvantages) of co-publishing and the motivation for co-publishing with the aim of bridging the digital divide. Libraries often co-publish. They enter into co-publishing relations on their own initiative, usually in order to facilitate the accomplishment of a publishing process, or through the initiative from a different publisher wishing to join forces with the libraries’ publishing capital and with a goal of reaching synergy and producing an excellent final product that will also reach the public.

In Chapter 9 we highlight major points made throughout the book and we conclude that publishing is one of the library services that is becoming increasingly important. This means that librarians and those who will become librarians should be familiar with some elements of publishing in order to strengthen the role of libraries as publishers.

Finally, there are two appendices. The aim of the first is to advise libraries on how to assess their past publishing activities and use them as a basis for development of the strategic plan. Appendix 2 gives the basic principles to be followed in order to improve publishing activities in the future, so that they result in strengthening libraries’ position in the society.

While writing this book we chose to describe principles and processes of library publishing in general, and we only emphasise specific print or electronic publishing requirements when needed. Nowadays it is not possible to seriously discuss publishing without paying attention to electronic publishing. Electronic publishing offers tremendous opportunities for libraries in all aspects of publishing, such as searching for, preparation of and writing the manuscript, as well as processing, designing, producing and distributing the publication to its end users. New technologies also have an effect on the process of making a print publication, as it allows for better, faster and more effective communication of all involved in the publication production chain all the way to the reader. The proof of this is in the process of making this book, where the authors collaborated on it even though they live 300 kilometres away from each other, and the publisher is five times as far away.