*But Were Afraid to Ask

In this guest post, Editions Marketing Manager Catherine English reflects on the joy of stress as she sends the latest version of the ALA Editions catalog off to press. (Congratulations, Catherine!) –JLF.

I have what well-meaning friends would term a toxic relationship with the ALA Editions catalog. I feel chronically tired, angry, and frightened throughout the process, and sustain a morbid fear (usually realized) of losing control. So what keeps me coming back for another onslaught every six months or so? The end result. That solitary glorious print sample that arrives on my desk before it reaches the homes of 150,000 ALA customers nationwide. The vibrancy of the new book covers and the smell of the freshly inked pages. The high fives from my Editorial and Marketing colleagues as I swagger down the ALA hallways basking in my catalog afterglow. In short: the prestige.

Putting together the Editions seasonal catalog is an onerous task and requires the input of a number of ALA staff.

CAST OVERVIEW (first billed only):

Catherine English, Marketing Manager: Catalog producer, design coordinator, marketing copywriter, book cover design coordinator, author biographer, list manager, new product trainer, and all around Orson Welles

Eugenia Chun, Editorial Assistant: Marketing packet wrangler

Jenni Fry, Acquisitions Editor: A recurring role involving my catalog copy, her red pen, and many strikethroughs and question marks

Christine Schwab, Managing Editor: See Jenni’s role, above, and multiply x 10

Mary Mackay, Director of Marketing: The “Post-It Queen,” Mary provides suggestions and cross-marketing tips

Patrick Hogan, Director, Online Resources: While still in his former role as Editorial Director of ALA Editions, Patrick and I defined the current frontlist. He also gently talked me off the ledge when I asked to include books that hadn’t yet been signed.

Tina Coleman, Editions Marketing Coordinator: Index proofer and list coordinator

Kimberly Saar, Production Designer: Catalog designer, book jacket designer, and all around marketing design guru. (After the ninth pass of our current catalog, Kim has taken leave for exhaustion.)

If you, too, like the smell of freshly inked pages, you can request a print copy of your very own.–JLF.

Here’s a nice summary review from the Wired Compiler blog. Includes comparison with Shelfari and LibraryThing features. First learned of it from Libraryman (thanks, Michael!).

After reading Karen Schneider’s post on the ALA TechSource blog and Tim Spalding’s post on the Thingology blog, I put David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous on my to-read list. This past weekend, I got a third take on the book from Amanda Chapel. See her review on her blog, Strumpette. (Fair warning: Strumpette, which targets the PR industry, is not a polite blog. Some readers will be amused by the attitude and language; some will not.)

You might also be interested in Weinberger’s guest post on Strumpette last August, on the topic of Internet transparency.

I have been curious about the Google Co-op tool since I first heard about it. I wondered where Google would take it, what they’re up to with this tool. In its earliest implementations they seemed to be angling toward a health information portal, though the tool can be used for any content. I thought about how we at ALA might use it, and put it on my “Someday” list. One thought was to gather up ALA’s various best of the Web picks.

Bill Drew did so with the Reference and User Services Association’s best free reference Web sites. In the past, I have ripped these from the RUSQ journal when I came across one and filed it away at home thinking I would one day bookmark those that might be of future use. Now I can throw that folder away.

Contributing editors of Guide to Reference are selecting free Web sites as well as print and fee-based databases. Editors of Reference Sources for Small and Medium-Sized Libraries have done so with their manuscript in-house. Perhaps these sources could be lumped in with RUSA’s best. ALA’s librarian, Karen Muller, created a Google Co-op search engine Librarian’s E-Library.

Should the Association of Library Service for Children copy their Great Web Sites for Kids into Google Co-op?

Ben Bunnell of Google included Google Co-op Custom Search Engine in his Midwinter 2007 presentation. He suggested Google Co-op custom search engine as an alternative to creating lists of links , citing Real Climate as an example. You can place the search box and results on your Web site and specify or prioritize sites to search. At Real Climate, Google custom search engine is a radio button choice under a standard search box. Another possibility for free content of Guide to Reference.

Because I use blogs as one way of keeping up with the profession and, ultimately, as a method for gathering new book ideas, I try to keep current on my reading. Conferences, sicknesses, and an influx of manuscripts have conspired against me so far this year, however, and I am rather behind. My aggregator of choice is Google Reader, which organizes the incoming posts strictly by date of post rather than grouped by feed. This keeps me honest in reading a wide range of opinions; with my old aggregator, which organized by feed, I’d lapse into reading only a handful of my favorites. But, this by-date arrangement also makes it very obvious exactly how far behind I am.

For a while I was running two months behind, but once I got through all of the Midwinter Meeting posts, I quickly caught up to being at a steady one-month lag. And I must say, I rather like the view from here. After a month, I can read the post and all the comments in one sitting. And in case you haven’t been listening to the social software gurus, let me tell you, it’s all about the conversation. A so-so post can take on new depth when bolstered by comments and rebuttals. A post that seemed convincing and insightful when I was speed-reading it over lunch can look positively moth-eaten in light of another’s counterpoints offered after a more considered reading than my own.

Yes, I hear you—Subscribe to the comment feeds! you say. But it’s not the same. For me, getting the conversations in bits and pieces ruins the effect. So here I’ll stay for a while, a month behind the leading edge, but right in the middle of the conversation.