New! A Good Match

When Rebecca Watson-Boone first proposed her project to ALA Editions, I took a pass on it. As a research report for a specialized audience, the project did not fit our publishing strategy. The project presents a good example of the sort of balance association publishers must strike between mission and margin. Managing a profit generating unit for ALA, I am accountable to our bottom line and therefore evaluate prospective projects first for marketability. On the other hand, we also need to be attentive to the larger goals of the association and be creative about ways that we can support them.

Denise Davis, director of ALA’s Office for Research and Statistics, went to bat for this project. She was familiar with Watson-Boone’s research and had a draft manuscript. Denise felt strongly that the research was important information for recruitment to librarianship. She was looking for a way ALA could get it into the hands of the educators and adminstrators in library and information science schools and college career counselors. The research investigates career choice and satisfaction among graduates of liberal arts colleges who went into librarianship.

After discussion with Denise and later with my publishing colleagues, we decided to go forward with the project. A Good Match marks the first of a series with the straightforward name ALA Research Series. Denis Davis will effectively be our acquisitions editor, looking for the best of research and taking care of the upfront manuscript reviews and substantive editing.