Blind Author and Publisher Make Are You Two Sisters? Accessible

This week in North Philly Notes, Susan Krieger, author of Are You Two Sisters?, addresses the need for books to be made available in formats for the blind and others with print disabilities.

Because I am blind as well as a writer and a sociologist, each time I have a new book about to be published, I must take steps to make sure that book will be available for others like me, who are blind or have challenges in reading print.

In writing my books and articles, I use a screen reader: a computer program that translates text to speech. It reads aloud to me all the text on the screen, the dialog boxes, and the keystrokes as I type them. I hear my words spoken aloud rather than visually seeing them. As I wrote my latest book, Are You Two Sisters? The Journey of a Lesbian Couple, I listened intently to the words on the page as I typed them, going over and over the text of the book in my mind after hearing it spoken to me, making my revisions as needed.

When I submitted the final book manuscript to Temple University Press for copyediting and subsequent production, I was anxious about how the process would go. Would the copyeditor be responsive to my needs for a different way of entering proposed changes than is usually used for sighted authors? Would the final published book be one that I, a blind author, could easily read and be proud to disseminate to blind and print-disabled readers?

I am happy to say that Temple University Press has been extremely generous in assisting me in enabling the production of accessible versions of Are You Two Sisters? for the blind and print-disabled. The Press has made special efforts on my behalf through each stage of the production process—ensuring that the copyeditor would be sensitive to my needs for alternate ways of entering changes on the manuscript; preparing the typography of the book design in a manner that a person using a screen reader can accurately navigate; assigning a remediation specialist to work with me to produce an accessible ADA compliant PDF version of the book; and facilitating my production of an independent audiobook edition.

As a result, Are You Two Sisters? is now available in several alternate formats for blind and print-disabled readers. An accessible PDF and Word version can be obtained from the publisher or author; a Daisy digital text, Braille ready Format, or an ePub version can be obtained from Bookshare.org; and an independent audiobook version can be enjoyed through Audible.

Blind readers are well aware that the PDFs of books and articles are often hard to navigate. Although they look fine to sighted readers, the hidden codes or choices that have gone into these documents may be poorly executed and nonstandard and may pose overwhelming barriers to reading. Each time I have a new book published, I become painfully aware of those barriers and seek to overcome them.

I strongly believe that all print materials should be as accessible for blind and disabled readers as they are for the sighted. Sadly, in our world of abundant print—both in books and online—the playing field is not level. Most of the print in the world that is available to the sighted is not equally accessible to the blind. This is something that needs to be changed, but that will only happen when requirements for equal access are enforced and when authors and producers of print materials embark on the task of finding new ways of making information accessible. I am grateful to Temple University Press for allowing me to guide the accessibility process, and I hope that readers will enjoy Are You Two Sisters? in one of its several formats!

Celebrating Black History Month

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase some our recent and deep backlist titles for Black History Month.

Recently Published

The Civil Rights Lobby: The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the Second Reconstruction, by Shamira Gelbman

As the lobbying arm of the civil rights movement, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR)—which has operated since the early 1950s—was instrumental in the historic legislative breakthroughs of the Second Reconstruction. The Civil Rights Lobby skillfully recounts the LCCR’s professional and grassroots lobbying that contributed to these signature civil rights policy achievements in the 1950s and ’60s.

Slavery and Abolition in Pennsylvania, by Beverley C. Tomek

Beverly Tomek corrects the long-held notion that slavery in the North was “not so bad” as, or somehow “more humane” than, in the South due to the presence of abolitionists. While the Quaker presence focused on moral and practical opposition to bondage, slavery was ubiquitous. Nevertheless, Pennsylvania was the first state to pass an abolition law in the United States.

Black Identity Viewed from a Barber’s Chair: Nigrescence and Eudamonia, by William E. Cross, Jr.

Cross connects W. E. B. DuBois’s concept of double consciousness to an analysis of how Black identity is performed in everyday life, and traces the origins of the deficit perspective on Black culture to scholarship dating back to the 1930s.

God Is Change: Religious Practices and Ideologies in the Works of Octavia Butler, edited by Aparajita Nanda and Shelby L. Crosby

Exploring Octavia Butler’s religious imagination and its potential for healing and liberation, God Is Change meditates on alternate religious possibilities that open different political and cultural futures to illustrate humanity’s ability to endure change and thrive.

From Our Backlist

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The Black Female Body: A Photographic History, by Deborah Willis and Carla Williams

Searching for photographic images of black women, Deborah Willis and Carla Williams were startled to find them by the hundreds. In long-forgotten books, in art museums, in European and U.S. archives and private collections, a hidden history of representation awaited discovery. The Black Female Body offers a stunning array of familiar and many virtually unknown photographs, showing how photographs reflected and reinforced Western culture’s fascination with black women’s bodies.

The Afrocentric Idea: Revised and Expanded Edition, by Molefi Kete Asante

Asante’s spirited engagement with culture warriors, neocons, and postmodernists updates this classic text. Expanding on his core ideas, Asante has cast The Afrocentric Idea in the tradition of provocative critiques of the established social order. This is a fresh and dynamic location of culture within the context of social change.

Mediating America: Black and Irish Press and the Struggle for Citizenship, 1870-1914, by Brian Shott

How black and Irish journalists in the Gilded Age used newspapers to recover and reinvigorate racial identities. As Shott proves, minority print culture was a powerful force in defining American nationhood and belonging.

Upon the Ruins of Liberty: Slavery, the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park, and Public Memory, by Roger C. Aden

A behind-the-scenes look at the development of the memorial to slavery in Independence Mall, Upon the Ruins of Liberty offers a compelling account that explores the intersection of contemporary racial politics with history, space, and public memory.

A City within A City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by Todd E Robinson

Examining the civil rights movement in the North, historian Todd Robinson studies the issues surrounding school integration and bureaucratic reforms in Grand Rapids as well as the role of black youth activism to detail the diversity of black resistance. He focuses on respectability within the African American community as a way of understanding how the movement was formed and held together. And he elucidates the oppositional role of northern conservatives regarding racial progress.

From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism, by Patricia Hill Collins

In this incisive and stimulating book, renowned social theorist Patricia Hill Collins investigates how nationalism has operated and re-emerged in the wake of contemporary globalization and offers an interpretation of how black nationalism works today in the wake of changing black youth identity. 

Men’s College Athletics and the Politics of Racial EqualityFive Pioneer Stories of Black Manliness, White Citizenship, and American Democracy, by Gregory Kaliss

Gregory Kaliss offers stunning insights into Americans’ contested visions of equality, fairness, black manhood, citizenship, and an equal opportunity society. He looks at Paul Robeson, Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, Jackie Robinson, Wilt Chamberlain, Charlie Scott, Bear Bryant, John Mitchell, and Wilbur Jackson to show how Americans responded to racial integration over time. 

Suffering and Sunset: World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin, by Celeste-Marie Bernier

A majestic biography of the pioneering African American artist, Suffering and Sunset illustrates Horace Pippin’s status as a groundbreaking African American painter who not only suffered from but also staged many artful resistances to racism in a white-dominated art world.

Frankie Manning: Ambassador of Lindy Hop, by Cynthia R Millman

The autobiography of a legendary swing dancer, Frankie Manning traces the evolution of swing dancing from its early days in Harlem through the post-World War II period, until it was eclipsed by rock ‘n’ roll and then disco. When swing made a comeback, Manning’s 30-year hiatus ended. 

Savoring the Salt: The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara, Edited by Linda Janet Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall

The extraordinary spirit of Toni Cade Bambara lives on in Savoring the Salt, a vibrant and appreciative recollection of the work and legacy of the multi-talented, African American writer, teacher, filmmaker, and activist. Among the contributors who remember Bambara, reflect on her work, and examine its meaning today are Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Pearl Cleage, Ruby Dee, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Nikki Giovanni, Avery Gordon, Audre Lorde, and Sonia Sanchez.

Philadelphia Freedoms: Black American Trauma, Memory, and Culture after King, by Michael Awkward

Philadelphia Freedoms captures the disputes over the meanings of racial politics and black identity during the post-King era in the City of Brotherly Love. Looking closely at four cultural moments, he shows how racial trauma and his native city’s history have been entwined.

Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing, by Justin Gifford

Gifford provides a hard-boiled investigation of hundreds of pulpy paperbacks written by Chester Himes, Donald Goines, and Iceberg Slim (aka Robert Beck), among many others. Gifford draws from an impressive array of archival materials to provide a first-of-its-kind literary and cultural history of this distinctive genre.

Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Live, by Tiffany Ruby Patterson

A historian hoping to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns or the segregated black sections of other towns in the South finds only scant traces of their existence. In Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life, Tiffany Ruby Patterson uses the ethnographic and literary work of Zora Neale Hurston to augment the few official documents, newspaper accounts, and family records that pertain to these places hidden from history.

Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture, by Katrina Hazzard-Gordon

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon offers the first analysis of the development of the jook—an underground cultural institution created by the black working class—together with other dance arenas in African-American culture.

The Value of University Presses

This week in North Philly Notes, we share “The Value of University Presses,”  which was developed by the Association of University Presses and captures the many ways the world needs presses like Temple. 

The Value of University Presses

University Presses are at the center of the global knowledge ecosystem. We publish works and perform services that are of vast benefit to the diverse scholarly network—researchers, teachers, students, librarians, and the rest of the university community. Our work also reaches out to a broad audience of readers, and ultimately to the larger world that depends on informed and engaged peer-reviewed scholarship published to the highest standards. Each University Press brings a distinctive vision and mission to its work. Yet we are all guided by, and united in, core values—integrity, diversity, stewardship, and intellectual freedom—that define who we are, the work we do, and the goals to which we aspire.

University Presses and Society

1: University Presses make available to the broader public the full range and value of research generated by university faculty and by scholars outside the academy.

2: University Press books, journals, and digital publications present the foundational research and analysis that is drawn upon by policymakers, opinion leaders, nonprofits, journalists, and influential authors.

3: University Presses contribute to the abundance and variety of cultural expression at a time of continuing consolidation in the commercial publishing industry.

4: University Press publications provide deep insight into the widest range of histories and perspectives, giving voice to underrepresented groups and experiences.

5: University Presses make common cause with libraries, booksellers, museums, and other institutions to promote engagement with ideas and expose the public to a diversity of cultures and opinions.

6: University Presses help draw attention to the distinctiveness of local cultures through publication of works on the states and regions where they are based.

7: University Presses seek a wide readership by publishing in formats from print to ebook to audio to online and by making publications available in accessible alternative formats for those with print-related disabilities.

8: University Press translation programs make available to English-language audiences vital works of scholarship and literary importance written in other languages.

9: University Presses rediscover and maintain the availability of works important to scholarship and culture through reprint programs and through revival of key backlist titles, often via open digital editions.

10: University Presses encourage cultural expression by publishing original works of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and the visual arts.

University Presses and Scholarship

11: University Presses, through their rigorous peer review and faculty board approval process, test the validity and soundness of scholarship in order to maintain high standards for academic publication.

12: University Presses add value to scholarly work through careful editorial development; professional copyediting and design; extensive promotion and discoverability efforts; and global distribution networks.

13: University Presses include in their community a wide array of institutions – including scholarly associations, research institutes, government agencies, museums, and international presses – thus representing a diversified research culture.

14: University Presses recognize important fresh perspectives in scholarship by sponsoring work in emerging and interdisciplinary areas that have not yet gained wide attention.

15: University Presses sponsor and develop the work of early-career scholars through publication of their first books, which establish credentials and develop authorial experience.

16: University Presses publish established and start-up scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and STEM disciplines that contribute to a thriving ecosystem of article-based scholarship.

17: University Presses actively promote the translation of works by English-speaking authors into other languages, making their scholarship available to researchers, students, and readers worldwide.

18: University Presses commit to multivolume publishing projects and dynamic digital resources, partnering with librarians, foundations, and other organizations on works of wide scope and enduring importance.

19: University Presses collaborate with learned societies, scholarly associations, and libraries to explore how new technologies can benefit and advance scholarship.

20: University Presses publish books, journal articles, and digital projects used in undergraduate and graduate courses as essential components of well-rounded syllabi and reading lists.

University Presses in the University Community

21: University Presses extend the mission, influence, and brand of their parent institutions, making evident their commitment to knowledge and ideas.

22: University Press publishing programs span the humanities, arts, social sciences, STEM fields, and professional schools, representing the full expanse of university research.

23: University Presses demonstrate their parent institutions’ support of research in essential academic fields – particularly in the humanities and social sciences – that are rarely supported by federal or corporate funding.

24: University Presses extend their parent institutions’ efforts at community engagement and outreach by publishing books of interest to their local communities and to a broader regional readership.

25: University Presses raise the public profile and reputation of their parent institutions by generating positive news coverage and reviews, receiving book awards, and maintaining active social media presences.

26: University Presses play a leading role in experimenting with and developing new platforms for delivering and engaging with scholarship.

27: University Presses partner with campus libraries, digital humanities centers, and other university departments to advance non-traditional initiatives in scholarly communication.

28: University Presses provide distribution and other publishing services to other university units and also act as distributors for independent publishers, ranging from established presses to innovative scholar-led initiatives.

29: University Press staff act as local experts for faculty and administrators, providing guidance on intellectual property, scholarly communication, and the publishing process.

30: University Presses engage in the teaching and learning mission by providing substantive work study, internship, and apprenticeship experiences for undergraduate and graduate students.

This essential document, articulating the value of university presses, was originally created in 2000 by a working group of three Association board members, Douglas Armato (Minnesota), Steve Cohn (Duke), and Susan Schott (Kansas). In 2018, the Association of University Presses invited Armato to form a new author group to update it. Our thanks go to him, Lisa Bayer (Georgia), Mahinder Kingra (Cornell), Erich van Rijn (California), and Stephanie Williams (Ohio) for this renewed statement.

Approved by the AUPresses Board of Directors June 2019.

“I’ll take film for $1000, Alex”

We’ve taken control of North Philly Notes to celebrate its illustrious creator and owner.

His twitter handle is “I’m a twin and a film critic who always has a book in his hand. I also have an opinion, and I’m not afraid to share it.“ That pretty much sums up Temple University Press’s publicity manager Gary Kramer. Gary has worked at the Press for almost 20 years and before that he had a brief stint at Princeton U. Press. At Temple, he’s responsible for the preparation of copy for book jackets, catalogs, and press releases as well as securing advance promotional statements from various academics. He plans and coordinates publicity activities for all Press books and participates in the development of marketing strategies. He compiles and produces a weekly update e-mail titled “News of the Week,” which informs our mailing list subscribers of the authors in the news, appearances, reviews published that week, and any new blog entries on our North Philly Notes blog site. He’s incredibly hard-working, smart, and engaging with amazing skills and abilities. He is also witty and imaginative. He responds to emails with lightning speed, and maintains such good relations with authors that oftentimes authors write him before they even approach their acquisitions editor.

But Gary has much more going on beyond his work at the Press. He’s the author of Independent Queer Cinema: Reviews and Interviews and co-author of Directory of World Cinema: Argentina. He’s also a film critic whose blurbs often adorn movie ads in the pages of the New York Times. Ask him any question about a film and he knows the answer; if you don’t know the name of the film just give him one actor’s name and a one sentence description of the film and he’ll name the film.

Gary exemplifies everything we love about university press publishing.  He gives his all to the Press and our authors, he’s a published author, and his film reviews are read by moviegoers worldwide.

Jeopardy anyone?

Why Everyday Life Matters

This week in North Philly Notes, Ulka Anjaria, author of Reading India Now, explains the importance of reading literature to understand the Indian present and its political futures.

The Indian general elections are once again upon us. Like the upcoming U.S. election, this one too is fraught with anxiety about whether the country will re-elect the right-wing party of its incumbent prime minister. As part of legitimate fears about a global right-wing turn, this is the brief period when Indian politics becomes global news. But what is happening in India between globally-significant elections? What is the daily life of this fast-changing country beyond institutional politics, what are the stories that might never make global headlines? How are people coming to terms with recent changes – not only at the voting booth, but as they imagine their everyday lives?

When I spent a fellowship year living in Mumbai in 2015-16, one of the many things I was struck by was how distant both scholarship and the news media are from everyday life in India. There were several disturbing and violent, national-level events that occurred that year, such as the assassination of Kannada writer M. M. Kalburgi in August and the Award Wapsi movement that followed, where dozens of writers protested the government’s increasing indifference to mob violence by returning their national literary awards. A beef ban was instituted in Maharashtra, exposing the encroachment of Hindu hegemony on eating practices in the supposedly secular nation. Rohith Vemula, a Dalit student, committed suicide in Hyderabad, revealing the continuing casteism that plagues even university campuses. But in between these events, daily life went along at an everyday rhythm, much as it does around the world. Looking around to see where I could begin to read about this everyday rhythm, I found that it was largely absent in the news media and in scholarly accounts. While the news media, in both India and abroad, focuses mostly on party politics and violent events, scholarship tends to take a longer view, uncovering the influence of historical forces such as colonialism and Partition on the Indian present. While both of these are important tasks, I found that I had to turn to literature, specifically contemporary Indian literature, to begin to understand the contours of the Indian present.

For in fact, India is experiencing a massive expansion of its publishing industry, with some anticipating that India will be the world’s largest English-language publisher within a decade. This means that whereas in the 1980s and 1990s, many Indian authors had to gain legitimacy by publishing first in the US or UK, now Indian publishers have made it much easier to publish as an Indian writer. This has resulted in an expansion of what genres authors can publish in, such as fantasy fiction, mysteries and detective fiction, romance, chick lit, self-help fiction, graphic novels, and so on. Most of these new works are geared toward Indian readers rather than, as was in the past, international ones. This is coinciding with an expansion of the English-language readership in India beyond those who are western-educated, to first-generation English readers who might otherwise be reading in the bhashas (Indian vernacular languages).

Reading India Now, looks at the implications of this publishing boom for rethinking what is important in the study of India. Much of this new fiction is written for young people trying to make their way in a new India, and are thus local stories for local readers. As such, they do not often engage with historical analysis or with who is in power, but address issues of more local importance: what is the meaning of success, what are the possibilities and limitations of the new capitalist economy, what are the new social and sexual mores of the new India, and so on. If read as complex works rather than just simplistic, market-oriented fictions, these new books tell us a huge amount about the kind of daily life that never makes the headlines.

Arguing against public land privatization and transfer

This week in North Philly Notes, Steven Davis, author of In Defense of Public Lands provides his arguments for why privatization, transfer, and deregulation of our public land are disastrously bad policies. 

This past spring break, I had the privilege to visit Chiricahua National Monument in the rugged southeast corner of Arizona. From Tucson, I drove several hours through a lonely, desolate landscape until I came to this extremely remote spot, far from any town. To my amazement, I found it crowded with visitors, an indication perhaps, of how much Americans (and many others) love public land. Chiricahua, named, in Apache, for its fantastical rock formations, is managed by the National Park Service, and surrounded by hundreds of thousands of additional acres of the Coronado National Forest. It is what’s known as a “sky island forest” rising high enough from its sun-baked surroundings to wring moisture out of the sky. Its forests of juniper, Ponderosa pine, and Douglas fir teem with wildlife. As such, this complex of public land is like some sort of fountain pouring out a continuous flow of precious and valuable things; aesthetic, historic, cultural, biological, and economic. And best of all, it belongs to all of us collectively.

Unfortunately, our federal public lands now face unprecedented waves of proposed legislation to either privatize their ownership or else transfer large blocks to state control (to do with as states please). Even short of privatization, public lands now face an onslaught of resource extraction and lax regulation. The Trump Administration’s recent elimination of nearly 2 million acres of National Monument designations at Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante in Utah is the largest such declassification of protected land in U.S. history.

In my book In Defense of Public Land, I lay out biological, economic, and political arguments for why privatization, transfer, and deregulation of our public land are disastrously bad policies. Reviewing a great deal of literature and data, I specifically find that: 

• By nearly every measure of ecological health examined, including individual populations of imperiled species, degree of forest and habitat fragmentation, ecosystem stability and permanence, acreage of imperiled landscape communities, amount of suitable habitat for conservative species, and forest biodiversity, public land, as a whole, outperforms private land. 

• Since there are no functioning markets for such things as ecological restoration activities, endangered species recovery, rare landscape communities, or forest biodiversity, they generally occur on public rather than private land as their costs are collectively absorbed as public goods. 

• Public lands are far more valuable than traditionally assumed by torturously narrow free market valuation models. Models that more broadly measure economic multiplier effects or else incorporate a wider range of non-market values, find tremendous economic value in public lands. The ROI (Return of Investment) data for public land acquisition and operation shows 400-1100% returns, while Western counties with the most federal land outperform neighboring counties with less federal land in employment growth, personal and per capita income, and population growth. 

• This ledger sheet becomes wildly imbalanced in favor of public land when one considers that they also provide trillions of dollars worth of mostly unpriced ecosystem services for such things as water filtration, water retention and flood control, pollination services, carbon sequestration, soil retention, etc. 

• The total annual operational cost for managing this 640 million acre treasure trove of federal land is $11.1 billion, about a billion dollars less than one month of Iraq War operations at the height of the war and about half of the annual costs for just air conditioning at our military bases in Iraq. 

• Like libraries and public schools, public lands are profoundly democratic; with full access for all. This is no small thing in a country that lacks the guaranteed right-of-way on private land that is common in European countries. Some of the greatest wonders on this continent are a common inheritance.  

• Because it is determined in the political sphere, management of public land inevitably becomes a messy, conflictual, and deeply polarized affair. But it is also a largely democratic process that is wide-open to public participation, access by varied stakeholders, and the accountability afforded by administrative appeals and judicial challenge. None of this is available on private land.

Our public lands are an absolute treasure which some people, whether for ideological or mercenary reasons, want to wrest from the many and give to the few. We should not allow them to.

 

Celebrating Independent Bookstore Day

This week in North Philly Notes, Temple University Press celebrates Independent Bookstore Day, Saturday, April 28.  Join the Party! Visit one of these participating area bookstores:

• Big Blue Marble Bookstore, 551 Carpenter Lane, Mt. Airy Village, Philadelphia
• Doylestown Bookshop, 16 S. Main Street, Doylestown, PA
• Main Point Books, 116 N. Wayne Ave, Wayne, PA
• Open Book Bookstore, 7900 High School Road, Elkins Park, PA
• Towne Book Center & Cafe, 220 Plaza Drive, Suite B-3, Collegeville, PA

What is Independent Bookstore Day?

Independent Bookstore Day is a one-day national party that takes place at indie bookstores across the country on the last Saturday in April.  Every store is unique and independent, and every party is different. But in addition to authors, live music, cupcakes, scavenger hunts, kids events, art tables, readings, barbecues, contests, and other fun stuff, there are exclusive books and literary items that you can only get on that day. Not before. Not after. Not online.

Why are we celebrating independent bookstores?

Independent bookstores are not just stores, they’re community centers and local anchors run by passionate readers. They are entire universes of ideas that contain the possibility of real serendipity. They are lively performance spaces and quiet places where aimless perusal is a day well spent.

In a world of tweets and algorithms and pageless digital downloads, bookstores are not a dying anachronism.  They are living, breathing organisms that continue to grow and expand. In fact, there are more of them this year than there were last year. And they are at your service.

Reflections on the 2016 Library Publishing Forum

This week in North Philly Notes,  we re-post an article from the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication by Temple University Press’ editorial assistant and rights and contracts coordinator,  Nikki Miller.

As one of two recipients of the first annual AAUP-LPC Cross Pollination Grant, I had the
opportunity to attend the 2016 Library Publishing Forum and the OER Pre-Conference
in Denton, TX. As this was my first time interacting with library voices on the subject of
library publishing, and as I am a relative newcomer to the publishing industry, I was worried that my inexperience in library publishing and library and press collaboration would hinder my experience—and my impact—at the Forum. I was afraid I would appear an amateur and feel that I did not belong. However, I quickly learned that the LPC’s goal isn’t all that different from ours at Temple University Press, and that of other academic publishers. The LPC’s mission statement reads:

The Library Publishing Coalition promotes the development of innovative, sustainable publishing services in academic and research libraries to support scholars as they create, advance, and disseminate knowledge.

The similarities appear in the support for scholars to create, advance, and disseminate
knowledge, and this goal was a constant refrain throughout the conference. My fears
proved baseless. Even as someone with very little previous knowledge about open access, I never felt like an outsider; I was welcomed and included into the group, and so many were eager to explain the goals of the Library Publishing Coalition and their respective institutions’ open access platforms and goals. By the time I left Texas, I collected an array of knowledge about library publishing, open access, the relationship between the two, and the relationship between them and university presses. I also gathered general takeaways that perhaps impacted me more. Those takeaways are shared below.

INCLUSIVITY

Not surprisingly, an intense sense of community and collaboration was prevalent
throughout the weekend. Panels were preceded with chatter among the audience members and followed with discussion between panelists and attendees. In fact, one of the plenary sessions, “Librarian Engagement and Social Justice in Publishing”, focused on the diversity of the field and what we can do to have a wider and more diverse community.

Not only was community discussed within library publishing, but it was also apparent
that community is encouraged between librarians and publishers. As we checked in
to registration, we were given an option of choosing one of two tote bags: one labeled
“pubrarian,” and the other labeled “liblisher”. I welcomed this as a strong symbol of
community and collaboration between university press publishers and library publishers, as it suggests that there is already unity between the two. Right from the beginning, I felt included as an outsider to library publishing. Many times throughout the conference, LPC members approached me for discussion and the social events were packed with conversation. I felt included in every aspect of the experience and was pleasantly surprised by how many people I met and with whom I developed working relationships.

SUSPENSE

A lot of discussion surrounded the topic of sustainability and how to ensure open access
products will remain self-sustaining. Not only is there a question of how to make publishing platforms financially self-sustaining, but also how to ensure the longevity of the scholarship published. The latter, I think, is the reason for an unknown future in open access. No one at the conference had an answer as to the future of open access, which left us in a state of suspense—just like any movie, this suspense is exciting. Publishing is in a state of transformation, and the effect open access will have in the future is not certain. Academia is going to experience the effects of open access as it continues to increase in popularity and gains credibility. This state of growth allows for collaboration and experimentation by a wide range of participants. It was reassuring to learn that I was not alone in being unsure of the future of open access and the effect it will—or will not—have on academia and traditional academic publishers. Many conversations are happening within the field and I am excited to participate in them, specifically between an institution’s library and its home press.

OVERALL

Not only did I leave Texas with a much better understanding of open access, but I also left with validation that I belonged at the conference as a voice from a university press. I felt that I had gained the network and tools that would allow me to facilitate further collaboration between the LPC and AAUP, which is a goal of the Cross-Pollination Grant. I believe that it has made me much better equipped to collaborate with our own library, and it affirmed my choice of a career. Overall, my attendance at the LPC taught me much more than the ins-and-outs of open access. With it, I gained confidence, validation, and affirmation that will continue to resonate with me as I continue my career in academic publishing.

Temple University Press and Libraries receive NEH grant to make out-of-print labor studies titles openly available

This week in North Philly Notes, we are proud to announce a grant Temple University Press and Temple Libraries received from the NEH.

Temple University Press and Temple University Libraries have received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to make 25 to 30 out-of-print labor studies titles freely available online as part of the Humanities Open Book Program. The titles were selected based on their impact on and ongoing relevance to scholars, students, and the general public.

Mary Rose Muccie, Director of Temple University Press, said, “The Press has long been a leading publisher of labor studies titles, many of which have gone out of print. We’re grateful to the NEH for their support as we make these titles available again without access barriers and help them to find new audiences.”

Joe Lucia, Dean of Libraries, added, “Temple University Press and Libraries welcome the opportunity to leverage our already strong relationship and partner on the digitization of these important titles. This is one in a series of projects that support our shared mission of making scholarship widely accessible.”

The books will be updated with new cover art and will include new forewords by experts in the field of labor studies that will place each book in its appropriate historical context. The selected titles reflect a range of disciplines, including history, sociology, political science, and education.

The digitized titles will be hosted on a custom project portal where readers will be able to download them in EPUB and PDF formats. A print-on-demand option will also be provided.

About Temple University Press
Founded in 1969, Temple University Press chose as its inspiration Russell Conwell’s vision of the university as a place of educational opportunity for the urban working class. The Press is perhaps best known as a publisher of books in the social sciences and the humanities, as well as books about Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley region. Temple was an early publisher of books in urban studies, housing and labor studies, organizational reform, social service reform, public religion, health care, and cultural studies. It became one of the first university presses to publish in what later became the fields of women’s studies, ethnic studies— including Asian American and Latino studies, as well as African American Studies.

About Temple University Libraries
Temple University Libraries serve as trusted keepers of the intellectual and cultural record—collecting, describing, providing access to, and preserving a broad universe of materials, including physical and digital collections, rare and unique books, manuscripts, archives, ephemera and the products of scholarly enterprise at Temple. We are committed to providing research and learning services, to providing open access to our facilities and information resources, and to fostering innovation and experimentation. The Libraries serve Temple’s students, researchers, teachers and neighbors on Main, Center City and Health Sciences Center campuses in Philadelphia and on our Ambler and Harrisburg campuses.

About The National Endowment for the Humanities

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

AAU, ARL, AAUP to Launch Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative

 

This week in North Philly Notes, Temple University Press is excited to participate in the AAU/ARL/AAUP Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative.

The Association of American Universities (AAU), Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and Association of American University Presses (AAUP) are implementing a new initiative to advance the wide dissemination of scholarship by humanities and humanistic social sciences faculty members by publishing free, open access, digital editions of peer-reviewed and professionally edited monographs.

The AAU/ARL/AAUP Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative, expected to launch this spring, will benefit scholars, the public, universities, libraries, and presses in several ways:

• Open access, digital monographs will make new research freely available online, thereby increasing the presence of humanities and social science scholarship on the web and opening up this content to more readers, putting it into the venue where many scholars are working.

• Publishing costs will be met by university-funded grants and other revenue sources. These publication grants will enable open access publishing and will send a strong signal to humanities and social sciences faculties that universities value and wish to promote their scholarship.

• The expanded dissemination of scholarship within and beyond the academy advances the core mission of universities to create and transmit new knowledge for public benefit.

• This initiative may enable the incorporation into digital monographs of new capacities, such as the integration of multimedia with text and the application of annotation and commenting tools, and can encourage the development of innovative forms of digital scholarship.

The funding model based on publication grants will allow presses to publish important, high-quality scholarship freely accessible to readers and independent of market constraints. The universities and colleges directly participating in this initiative will incorporate three components into their digital monograph publishing projects: provide a baseline university publishing grant of $15,000 to support the publication of an open access, digital monograph of 90,000 words or less (with additional funding for works of greater length or complexity to be negotiated by the author, institution, and publisher); set a target of awarding at least three publishing grants per year; and commit to participating in this initiative for five years.

To date, the following 12 institutions have committed to participate in this initiative.
(See institutional list expanded to include individual representatives.)

• Emory University
• Indiana University Bloomington
• Michigan State University
• New York University
• The Ohio State University
• Penn State University
• University of California, Davis
• University of California, Los Angeles
• University of Cincinnati
• University of Michigan
• University of Minnesota Twin Cities
• Virginia Tech

AAUP is actively compiling a list of member publishers that are currently ready to accept grants under the terms of this initiative, 57 publishers as of March 16, 2017. This list is expected to grow.

This initiative is the result of extensive planning conducted by a joint AAU/ARL task force, later joined by AAUP and then by interested, invited institutions. View a roster of the AAU/ARL/AAUP Open Access Monograph Publishing Initiative Task Force members guiding this project.

About the Association of American Universities
Founded in 1900, the Association of American Universities (AAU) comprises 62 distinguished institutions that continually advance society through education, research, and discovery. Our universities earn the majority of competitively awarded federal funding for academic research, are improving human life and wellbeing through research, and are educating tomorrow’s visionary leaders and global citizens. AAU members collectively help shape policy for higher education, science, and innovation; promote best practices in undergraduate and graduate education; and strengthen the contributions of research universities to society.

About the Association of Research Libraries
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 124 research libraries in the US and Canada. ARL’s mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations.

About the Association of American University Presses
The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) is an organization of over 140 international nonprofit scholarly publishers. Since 1937, AAUP advances the essential role of a global community of publishers whose mission is to ensure academic excellence and cultivate knowledge. The Association holds integrity, diversity, stewardship, and intellectual freedom as core values. AAUP members are active across many scholarly disciplines, including the humanities, arts, and sciences, publish significant regional and literary work, and are innovators in the world of digital publishing.