Salisbury, Leila W.

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Against the GrainVolume 25 | Issue 4 Article 28September 2013From A University Press-What's the Big Idea?Leila W. SalisburyUniversity Press of Mississippi, lsalisbury@ihl.state.ms.usFollow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/atgPart of the Library and Information Science CommonsThis document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact epubs@purdue.edu foradditional information.Recommended CitationSalisbury, Leila W. (2013) "From A University Press-What's the Big Idea?," Against the Grain: Vol. 25: Iss. 4, Article 28.DOI: https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.658051Against the Grain / September 2013 <http://www.against-the-grain.com>   NOTE: This is the version without the landing page URL“ Things always  go smoothly with  Emery-Pratt.  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Salisbury  (Director, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MS  39211;  Phone: 601-432-6205)  <lsalisbury@ihl.state.ms.us>The annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) took place in Boston in mid-June.  I always look forward to this meeting, for many reasons:  I’m reminded of the amazing collegiality and ingenuity of staff at presses across the country;  I invariably hear tales about others’ workflow or HR conundrums that make me quite happy to keep my own press’s set of challenges (and also make me feel that those challenges aren’t quite as big as I’d assumed them to be);  and I get to spend three days outside of my usual box listening to fresh and exciting ideas that I can adapt and apply to my own institution.  I always come away invigorated and grateful for this work I am privileged to do.In the meetings following the recession, publishers have been more open in sharing the challenges and threats (some of great magnitude) to how we operate as scholarly presses, and in cases when budget cuts are severe, whether we will continue to operate. I still remember the moment during the 2009 meeting when our dinner speaker, riffing off the famous line in the film A League of Their Own, exhorted to our beleaguered-looking group, “There is no crying in publishing!”  Given the sales most of us were seeing that year, this was a needed reminder.  On the whole, I’m delight-ed to report that as a group, university presses eschew the “misery loves company” mantra in favor of a spirit of cooperation and shared solutions, and this attitude and approach was evident at the 2013 annual meeting.Cooperation and advocacy were big themes, as were libraries and how they work as part of our ecosystem.  In his column for this issue, Alex Holzman will focus on the press-library relationship as it was explored at the meeting, so I’ll leave that discussion to him.  Strategies for outreach and institutional messaging came up time and time again.  As I strongly believe, university presses can no longer afford to hide their light under a bushel (during the meeting I heard that exact phrase from new AAUP executive di-rector Peter Berkery). So in sessions ranging from campus collabora-tions to institutional messaging to social media strategies to the global university press, we explored how to shine this light more openly and how to effectively engage our natural allies in scholarly communication and the offices and individuals — whether a library or a provost or a board — to whom we report.The conference proper opened with a plenary entitled “Three Big Ideas in Pub-lishing.”  Writer Jill Lepore talked about the role of the public intellectual and encouraged academics to engage with topics and a writing style accessible to a larger public.  Jacqueline Charlesworth, senior counsel to the U.S. Registrar of Copyrights, discussed the need for copyright reform.  She joked that current copyright law is perfectly suited to the needs of authors, libraries, and publishers — if you live in 1950.  Many heads nodded as she discussed the severe limitations and numerous gray areas of copyright law, law which does not provide adequate guidelines for digital content and today’s available technologies.  What truly con-stitutes transformative use?  How should fair use be defined in an age of digitally-enabled sharing at the click of a button?  Clarification continued on page 5252 Against the Grain / September 2013 <http://www.against-the-grain.com>From A University Pressfrom page 51on these and a host of other related issues will be invaluable for both libraries and publishers, since in the absence of modern guidelines, each group has developed definitions that work well for them but perhaps work less well for their counterparts.  Given all the confusion, publishers themselves have a vexed job in ad-vising their own authors about the proper (and legal) use of illustrations and quoted material. Congress is finally making serious rumblings about taking up copyright reform, and it’s high time.  But Charlesworth warned us not to get too giddy about this prospect, as she reminded the audience that the last time copyright reform was undertaken in Congress, it took 20 years to pass new legislation.The plenary’s final speaker was Michael Schrage, research fellow at the MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business.  Schrage spoke briefly about the monumental changes taking place in the business of publishing, and he then said, “You need to stop calling yourselves publishers.”  I suppose this might be the equivalent of a keynote speaker at ALA or Charleston telling the room, “Quit calling yourselves librarians.  It’s not working for you.”  A noticeable chill swept the room (also felt by Schrage himself, as I found out while chatting with him after the session), and many listeners tuned out (or started Tweeting) at that point. In situations such as this, I try to ask my-self:  what is it about what I’m hearing that challenges my worldview?  What is it about this statement that makes me uncomfortable? Through past experience, I have come to understand that these moments are often huge opportunities for learning and refram-ing.  Often, if something gets your hackles up, it’s because there’s a small grain of truth somewhere in the statement or situation that you really do not want to see.  In the case of Schrage’s statement, I was intrigued by what he was saying, perhaps in large part because it reminded me of a similar moment during a plenary session in Charleston several years ago.  A presenter from Highwire said some-thing to the effect of “publishers are good book publishers, but right now they’re not good content publishers.”  Hearing that set off alarm bells in my head and gave me shallow breathing and a rapid pulse for the next hour, partly because it was a scary prospect (pub-lishers needing to take on a new skill set and identity) and partly because I knew it was to a great extent true.While I was making these connections in my head and wondering where Schrage was going with this argument, he went on to talk about the decline of Kodak, once the king of the photography companies.  Schrage noted that Kodak lost sight of how people wanted to interact with photography, and that’s when Apple essentially stole the market for pictures. This is, of course, a great simplification (and only one interpretation) of what humbled the mighty Kodak.  But I found this to be a brilliant analogy, the root message of which I’ve tied to the struggle of modern publishers before.  It’s not that people suddenly stopped caring about or wanting pictures.  The point was that con-sumers wanted to engage with pictures in ways that Kodak was not facilitating or providing. The same message might be applied to scholarly publishers.  The issue is (thankfully) not that no one wants or cares about scholarly content.  The struggle for us as publishers is that we are in the process of rethinking how we engage readers and researchers.  We are rediscovering where we meet them and how they want to find, read, and use what it is that we offer. For me at least, that was the big idea.  The crucial reminder that we as scholarly pub-lishers need to be more nimble than Kodak, more attuned to how our books and content get used and where they get discovered and shared.  Rather than making an attack on our identities, perhaps Schrage was making a call for us to think of ourselves in broader terms, as facilitators of knowledge, rather than organiza-tions with only one defined product path.  The types of institutional and workflow flexibility and ingenuity I believe he was advocating are certainly not easy (and they’re also not cheap to develop), but we as publishers will be better and stronger for taking up the challenge.In the end, I take heart in the fact that university presses, at our very best, are also reflections of what we publish.  Scholarship is our mission and our guiding star, and schol-arship is not static.  It constantly changes and evolves, exchanging outmoded ideas and in-terpretations for ones that meet and exemplify current knowledge.  In what we publish, we seek to communicate ideas that push beyond accepted discussions and break new ground. Sometimes we even give the world a glimpse of what lies ahead.  We are good at doing this for the men and women we publish, and we can be good at doing this for ourselves as well.  So I’ll take the position that there is nothing wrong with being a publisher, and I’m proud to call myself one.  The key is defining “publisher” in a broad, dynamic, and forward looking way that allows us to continually engage with those big ideas and to give them life.  continued on page 53From the University Presses — Consorting and Collaborating at the AAUP MeetingColumn Editor:  Alex Holzman  (Director, Temple University Press;  Phone: 215-926-2145)  <aholzman@temple.edu>   http://www.temple.edu/tempressThe AAUP held its annual gathering in Boston this past June, with a near-re-cord number of folks exchanging tips, swapping stories, and just getting caught up. Leila Salisbury has a good summary of the atmospherics and other issues in her piece for this issue, so I’ll focus on a couple of themes that kept coming up again and again.Specifically, discussions of collaboration with other institutions within the uni-versity — primarily but not exclusively libraries — and ways university presses could collaborate and act consortially within our own community were scheduled into every time slot at the meeting.Let’s begin with the area most relevant to Against the Grain readers: library relations.  As more presses report directly into libraries (includ-ing Temple, where I hang my hat), it’s apt to at least begin a preliminary assessment of how it’s going.  This was precisely the subject in “Univer-sity Press & Library Cohabitation and Collabo-ration: Challenges and Opportunities.”  Three of the the four participants (all university press people, though librarians had plenty of chance to voice their own views in other sessions) told of their experiences when their press physically moved into the respective libraries at Georgia, Arizona, and Purdue.Not surprisingly, the results are related to the way the deci-sion to move the presses was reached.  Where there was consultation with all parties the move seemed to go more smoothly; where there was not, it was for one side like being shunted to a new foster home and for the other like taking on a boarder.  Plenty of potential, but some getting used to each other required.  Still, the takeaway from this session for me was Charles Watkinson’s account of how fully Purdue University Press and the Purdue Libraries are working together.  It is perhaps not coincidental that Charles is both Scholarly Communications and Press Director, thereby tearing down a wall that could easily keep li-brarians and professional publishers apart.  His division provides scholarly publishing services, from the depositing of unreviewed materials like conference proceedings, technical reports, and databases into the institutional repository 

From A University Press-What\u27s the Big Idea?

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