Jesse Shera, Librarianship, and Information Science

Jesse Hauk Shera did perhaps more than any other figure in defining library and information science in the mid 20th century. He pioneered the application of information technology in libraries and in the field of documentation, as head of the American Documentation Institute (now ASIST), as a professor at the Graduate Library School in Chicago, and as head of the library school at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. At Western Reserve, Shera founded the Center for Documentation and Communication Research. But despite his efforts in introducing information technology to the field of libraries, Shera was a humanist and a historian who emphasized the human side of librarianship and the sociological nature of the profession, especially in his advancing years. His theory of social epistempology provided a philosophy for librarianship as a professional calling and as a research-oriented discipline, where deep subject knowledge and an understanding of the needs of readers are more important than technological tools.

H. Curtis Wright’s study, originally published in 1988 by Brigham Young University’s School of Information Sciences, is the only book-length biography of Shera that has been written. The focus of Wright’s biography is Shera’s role in defining and negotiating the boundaries of library science and information science, as he sought to make the most intelligent use of technology in libraries without getting lost in the capacities of the astounding tools that were being developed. Wright succeeds in showing how over a long career, Shera developed an intellectual foundation for librarianship that was dependent neither or the new ideas of information science and its technologies nor on traditional methods. This book is a superb introduction to Jesse Shera’s life and career and its meaning. Includes a foreword by Kathryn La Barre and an index by Victoria Jacobs.

This book is available from Amazon or your favorite vendor to libraries.

Here is an interview that Emily Drabinski did with Maria Accardi. Maria has a book coming out this summer with Library Juice Press, in the series that Emily edits….

Maria T. Accardi is Associate Librarian and Coordinator of Instruction at the Indiana University Southeast Library in New Albany, Indiana, a regional campus of Indiana University Bloomington. She holds a BA in English from Northern Kentucky University, an MA in English from the University of Louisville, and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. She served as a co-editor of and contributor to Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (Library Juice Press, 2010), and is the author of the forthcoming Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (Library Juice Press, 2013). Prior to entering librarianship, Maria taught first year college composition and tutored in a university writing center, and these experiences inform her current practice as a librarian instructor.

1. Why feminist pedagogy? What brought you to this topic for a book?

I came to this topic in part because I wanted to know more about feminist teaching and learn something new, and also because I wanted to contribute to the scholarship in my profession. I am a feminist who is interested in critical, liberatory teaching methods, so bringing together feminism and teaching seemed like a natural place to start an exploration. Sharon Ladenson began the conversation about feminist pedagogy and library instruction in Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods in 2010, and I wanted to engage with and extend this conversation by providing theoretical frameworks and practical strategies for people interested in feminist library instruction. Also, I really wanted to just write a book to see if I could. Apparently, I can!

2. What should readers expect when they crack the spine of Feminist Pedagogy?

Readers should expect a combination of practitioner’s primer, scholarship, and memoir. I didn’t set out to write a genre-bending book, but as I engaged with the feminist literature, listened to my own voice as a writer, and found nurturing support through you, my editor, I had a real breakthrough and realized that this boundaries-straddling approach was the only way I could write this book. So readers should expect a book that doesn’t neatly fit into the typical categories of literature in our field. Readers should also expect a book that is designed to be participative; there are practical teaching strategies and ideas in the appendices that invite, and, I hope, inspire readers to enact feminist pedagogy in their own practice.

3. What did you learn about your own teaching practice as you wrote the book?

When I wrote about the importance of self-care for the feminist teacher, I realized that I was doling out advice that I needed to take myself. Feminist teaching is hard. It is emotionally and intellectually demanding. I learned that I need to give myself permission to take a break, go easy on myself, to be honest and reflective without beating myself up. This fall, when library instruction season starts up once again, I plan to carve out time to keep a reflective journal about my teaching practices as a method of self-care.

4. When you’ve presented on this work before (ACRL 2013), people have noted the connections between the kind of instruction they’re already engaging and the feminist approaches you discuss in the book. Why do you think it’s important to name some of these practices as explicitly feminist?

I think it’s important to acknowledge these things as feminist because this is how we expose the intersecting societal oppressions that are replicated and reified in the classroom. When we make explicit was is normally tacit, we help equip students to transform themselves and their lives. Feminist pedagogy wants students to become not just critical thinkers but critical actors.

5. What else should readers know about the book?

As I say in my Acknowledgements, I have always wanted to be a writer, ever since I was a little girl and wrote a poem to read at my school talent show. Writing this book is truly a dream come true, and it is maybe the bravest thing I’ve ever done. This book represents me intellectually and emotionally and it is scary to release it into the world for people to read. I just hope that people will find the book to be engaging, useful, interesting, and, dare I say it? Inspirational. I hope that it is the beginning of many exciting conversations about feminist library instruction and while I’m simultaneously terrified, I can’t wait to see what happens once people read it.

We are announcing that Litwin Books, Library Juice Press, and Auslander & Fox will no longer sell books directly off our website or at conferences. Direct retail sales have always been a small part of our business. Most people buy our books from Amazon, other online retailers, or through vendors to libraries such as YBP. We are getting out of retail sales because it is kind of an administrative headache, especially with regard to the requirement to collect sales tax on sales in California (and soon possibly the 50 states). We have a lot of projects, and stopping retail sales is a way to streamline things so that we have enough time to do the things that matter: signing authors, editing and publishing their books, offering and supporting classes through Library Juice Academy, and other ventures, some experimental.

You should have no trouble finding our books on Amazon or other places. We will only be bringing enough copies of our books to conferences to show them to people, and we’ll be giving those copies away. (We’re not supposed to do any selling out of the inexpensive “independent press” booths anyway.)

One complication: If you own a gift certificate, you won’t be able to redeem it the way you’re supposed to at this point, because we’ve taken our book selling interface offline. If you want to redeem a gift certificate, write to me at rory at litwinbooks dot com and I can work with you.

Thanks much….

Just a note to say that Library Juice is on Pinterest. Please feel free to enjoy our content!

The 2013 Green Book Festival awarded its top honor in the category of Best Business Book to Greening Libraries, edited by Monika Antonelli and Mark McCullough and published by Library Juice Press.

Greening Libraries provides library professionals with a collection of articles and papers that serve as a portal to understanding a wide range of green and sustainable practices within libraries and the library profession. The book’s articles come from a variety of perspectives on a range of topics related to green practices, sustainability and the library profession. Aspects of the growing “green library movement” covered include green buildings, alternative energy resources, conservation, green library services and practices, operations, programming, and outreach.

The Green Book Festival gives awards in a number of categories, as well as overall best and honorable mention awards, which makes it a useful collection development tool for librarians.

If you’ve started your planning for ALA Annual, here’s something to consider for Monday night, July 1st. Library Juice Press is having a reception/party kind of thing at 7pm. There will be drinks and some things to nosh. We created a Facebook event with details. This will also be for Litwin Books, Library Juice Academy, and Auslander & Fox. Hope to see you there…

Emily Drabinski is the editor of a book series with Litwin Books and Library Juice Press, titled, “Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies.” Originally it was “Gender and Sexuality in Librarianship,” but pretty quickly it was clear from the titles that she was lining up that the emphasis was going to be on theoretical topics that would be of interest to scholars outside the library profession, so we updated the title. It occurred to me that this would be a good time to do an interview with Emily about the series and the books that are coming up in it, and Emily agrees. So, Emily, thanks for doing this interview.

Hi Rory!

I think the way I’d like to do this is really just to get you to talk about the series and describe the upcoming books. I don’t think I have an accurate memory of how it got started, so do you want to start by telling that story? Did it derive from a particular book project?

I’m also not sure how this book series got started! It’s funny how short my memory has gotten. Thank god for google–searching back through my gmail I see that we started talking about the series in 2009, just as I was finishing up the editing work on Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (with Maria Accardi and Alana Kumbier). At the time I was also circling around questions of intersections of critical work on gender and sexuality and library organization systems in my own work. We first met at the UW-Milwaukee Thinking Critically conference in 2008, where I presented a paper about queer geography and library shelf space, and I’m guessing that’s what put me in your head as someone with some content interest.

I also had editorial and clerical interest in the series. It turns out that I like working with other people on their work more than I like working on my own work, at least some of the time. I love talking to people about their ideas, shaping editorial calls, looking through raw copy for the heart of the story. It’s like an intimate friendship with ideas, and I love it. It also turns out that I’m pretty good at the clerical parts of the job, managing timelines and deadlines, versioning manuscripts, keeping track of contracts, the nuts and bolts of producing books. This is a part of the job I am getting better at. When I was working with Lyz Bly and Kelly Wooten on Make Your Own History, I was new to Dropbox and downloaded all the chapters without realizing that I’d disappeared them from the shared folder. Kelly freaked out a little, and I learned a solid lesson. Now I don’t know what I’d do without that particular cloud.

The first book was Tracy Nectoux’s Out Behind the Desk, a collection of personal stories and critical reflections on being and coming out in libraries. She pitched me the book based on the call for the series, and it felt like a great fit. While other library presses publish work on gender and sexuality studies, I felt like her book would benefit from the context of the series, being part of a set of titles addressing similar questions in a variety of ways.

I think that was a good way to start the series, although the ones you have been working on since are quite different. We published Make Your Own History last year. Do you want to describe that project and how it came about?

Kelly Wooten and Lyz Bly edited the second book in the series. It’s a collection of chapters about the the theory and practice–my favorite mix, and what makes our field so interesting to think and work in–of feminist and queer archives. Their authors are really from all over the place–the academy and activist circles, feminist presses and queer zine collections. It’s a rich set of texts that I think is the first of its kind, and belongs in the hands of theorists, practitioners, and activists. It was also a book that taught me about the importance of contracts and copyright. All of the authors were really aware of copyright issues and made their concerns very known to me–that was helpful! After working together for more than a year on this project, Kelly and I finally got to meet at a reading in Brooklyn at the Feminist Zine Fest, organized by Kate Angell and Elvis Bakaitis. The book gave us a reason to have a public conversation about feminist and queer history. That’s the real power of this series, I think. The titles enable conversations that I think we’re already having, but in a less organized way.

That book has definitely attracted interest and has been a part of conversations, which is very gratifying. That is what I hope to achieve. So we have a number of titles coming up in your series. Would you describe what’s coming up?

It is a busy, busy time for the series, with three books just about to be hot off the presses. First up is the Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, a collection edited by Patrick Keilty and Becca Dean. I’m thrilled about this project–it does the kind of work that I always wanted to see in the field. They’ve pulled together critical essays from feminist and queer studies and put them against similar work in information studies. So, you’ll have a chapter about the invention of transgender as a legal category next to a chapter about library classifications of identity. The book puts LIS into critical conversation with fields that work as much on classification theory as we do. It’s just fantastic. Then come two monographs. Alana Kumbier is finishing a book about queer archives theory and practice that draws on theoretical work about “the archive” to describe a number of material archives projects as well as their representations. It’s cross-disciplinary in the best way, and will find readers in fields outside of the library. Maria Accardi is completing a primer on feminist pedagogy for teaching librarians. I’m a little in love with this little book. What started as a relatively dry, academic text about feminist theory has morphed into a hybrid memoir/feminist teaching manual. I think it will be the kind of book librarians will turn to again and again–I anticipate many a coffee-stained, dog-eared copy, ripped out lesson plans, . And Rachel Wexelbaum is editing a collection about LGBTQ libraries and archives in the digital world. It’s an exciting and busy time to be involved with this series.

And while all that is going on, you are accepting book proposals and submissions for future projects in the series. How would you define the scope of the series for people who may want to submit something to it? What issues do you hope to address with future titles?

Yes, I am absolutely seeking new projects. The series has both practical and theoretical scopes, and proposals are welcome for either. In terms of practical projects, I’m particularly interested in books that provide a how-to for people in our field, like handbooks to feminist or queer cataloging, or a manual for setting up print or digital community archives for feminist collections. I also think we have room in our field for more abstract explorations of feminist and queer perspectives on knowledge production, organization, and access, as well as the politics of all three of those. I’d like the series to address a broad group of readers, those who want to open a book at 9am and then make something happen by noon, and those interested in reading and thinking through more complex arguments about the foundations and futures of our field. I am also really open to just talking with people who have only the germ of an idea. Dialogue has a way of turning a glimmer into a book for sale, so I hope people will get in touch.

That is wonderful. Readers, you can contact Emily at emily.drabinski at gmail dot com. Regarding communications with readers, I wonder if you could share some of the things that have come about as a result of these books – discussions, projects, etc. What have these books generated? I mean books in this series specifically, not your book on critical library instruction, which has had its own life post-publication.

Well, there are the concrete outcomes that are public and that I can articulate: Maria Accardi’s session about feminist pedagogy at ACRL was a direct outgrowth of her book project, and was quite well received this spring. She also just got tenure at the University of Illinois Southeast, an accomplishment I like to think this book played a hand in. Alana Kumbier presented on a chapter of her upcoming book at Barnard College’s Activism and the Academy conference in 2011 along with Jenna Freedman, who wrote an essay for Kelly Wooten and Lyz Bly’s collection. Out Behind the Desk was nominated for a 2011 Over the Rainbow award, and has been well reviewed in print and online. Kelly Wooten and Jenna Freedman spoke with me at the Feminist Zine Fest in Brooklyn. And then there are the outcomes that we’ll only see later, both in traditional ways (I’m following citations like a hawk!) and in ways less amenable to measurement. One of the reviewers of Tracy Nectoux’s book notes that the collection was “comforting.” I think he meant that he could see from reading the stories of these LGBT librarians that he wasn’t alone. I hope the series can be comforting to many readers in many ways, letting us know that we are not alone in our professional and theoretical conversations, and that they have a home on this series and on this press.

That’s right. Thanks for those links, too. I’m very pleased at the way these books have sent out waves. I hope that with future projects we can expand the range of people who will be comforted and feel included. I think that the way a book can help someone at a personal level is an extremely important aspect of publishing that we don’t normally think about when we think about scholarly communication. Which is not to diminish what could be said about your series from other perspectives.

I am wondering about your own intellectual interests, and when there might be a book in this series written by you. Any thoughts on that?

My own intellectual interests are a little bit all over the map right now–my hands are in a lot of pots as I come to the end of my tenure clock. I’ve been working with the journal Radical Teacher to go open access, and that is taking up a lot of my time. I think we’re just a week or so out from going live at http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu. I’m hoping to find venues to share what I learned, particularly about the kinds of worries that people who aren’t librarians have about the open access decision. I recently published the culmination of several years of puzzling through my thinking on what to do about the paradox of queer subject headings: how do we fix in place ideas and identities that change so rapidly and depend so entirely on context? That’s out in the April issue of Library Quarterly. You probably can’t tell by reading it, but it took me a very very long time to figure out how to say the pretty small something I said in that piece. We’ll see what I end up focusing on this summer: ideas of time in information literacy instruction, a curriculum analysis project I’m working on with a colleague, queer theory and retrieval systems, I’m in a bit of a reboot moment. I can’t imagine writing a book at all, let alone a book in this series. I have come to appreciate–and hope some of the authors I’ve worked with appreciate–the real pleasures of the author-editor relationship, especially at the small press scale. If I ever write a book, I think I’ll want to do it with an editor who isn’t me.

Congratulations on your article in Library Quarterly. Sounds like an exciting period, wherever things go from here in your own intellectual work. I think you are a very good editor, but I also hope that it doesn’t pull you away from your own writing too much.

To finish up the interview, I would like to ask if you have advice for writers and thinkers in our field who may have an ambition of publishing in your series or elsewhere. What do you think people should understand at various stages of working toward completion of book projects like the ones you have been editing?

Write every day. That is just the only way to write a book. Nobody sits down and writes a book; lots of people spend a little bit of time writing every day and end up with a book at the end. They aren’t exceptional people; they’re just people who decided to write more often than they didn’t. Make deadlines and meet them. When you feel like you want to stop, call your editor on the phone and let her talk you away from the shredder. And every single part of this process will take more time than you think it will, and it will be worth it. We all want to hear what you have to say.

Thanks very much for this interview, Emily. If I may say so, I think it’s a little bit inspiring!

Thanks, Rory. My work on this series feels like pretty invisible labor most of the time, so I’m glad to get a chance to talk about the project.

Lenny and Nina are Buried in Books

Author: Linda Cooper
Illustrator: Jana Vukovic
Price: $10.00
Published: March 2013
ISBN: 978-1-936117-88-8

For children 5-7 years old.

Lenny and Nina have so many books that they cannot find what they are looking for and Grandma almost can’t find them! Beginning with this somewhat silly, exaggerated situation, this book proceeds to introduce concepts of library organization to young children in an engaging and humorous story using vocabulary they can understand and a situation to which they can relate. The children’s solution to their problem both empowers them in organizing their own environment and introduces them to how the larger culture organizes information for the community.

New from Library Juice Press.

Award for Ongoing Doctoral Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information

http://litwinbooks.com/award.php

1. Nature of the Award

1.1 The award shall consist of $1,000, given annually to a graduate student who is working on a dissertation on the philosophy of information (broadly construed).

2. Purpose of the Award

2.1 The purpose of this award is to encourage and support scholarship in the philosophy of information.

3. Eligibility

3.1 The scholarship recipient must meet the following qualifications:
(a) Be an active doctoral student whose primary area of research is directly philosophical, whether the institutional setting is philosophy, information science, media studies, or another discipline; that is to say, the mode of dissertation research must be philosophical as opposed to empirical or literary study;
(b) Have completed all course work; and
(c) Have had a dissertation proposal accepted by the institution.

3.2 Recipients may receive the award not more than once.

4. Administration

4.1 The Litwin Books Award for Ongoing Doctoral Dissertation Research in the Philosophy of Information is sponsored and administered by Litwin Books, LLC, an independent scholarly publisher.

5. Nominations

5.1 Nominations should be submitted via email by June 1, to award@litwinbooks.com.

5.2 The submission package should include the following:
(a) The accepted dissertation proposal;
(b) A description of the work done to date;
(c) A letter of recommendation from a dissertation committee member;
(d) An up-to-date curriculum vitae with current contact information.

6. Selection of the Awardee

6.1 Submissions will be judged on merit with emphasis on the following:
(a) Clarity of thought;
(b) Originality;
(c) Relevance to our time;
(d) Evidence of good progress toward completion.

7. Notification

7.1 The winner and any honorable mentions will be notified via letter by July 1.

We’ve moved to Sacramento.

If you have an address on file for Library Juice Academy, Library Juice Press, Litwin Books, or Auslander & Fox, please update it to the following:

PO Box 188784
Sacramento, CA 95818

The telephone number remains 218-260-6115, and email addresses are also unchanged.

We can see the Capitol Building from the office, at least during the season when Sacramento’s many trees are not leafy. If you are in the area, please drop us a line – it would be nice to know we are in the same town.

We haven’t done this in the past, but I think I would like to begin a tradition of sending a “year-end update” to friends and customers. Why now? Probably because 2012 was a year that saw a lot of changes, and we are planning for 2013 to be a big year as well.

To begin with our major news of 2012, we started Library Juice Academy, which offers online courses to librarians and library workers for continuing education. We started lining up instructors in July and August, and started offering online classes beginning in October. We have a nice, diverse range of courses offered. These classes are skills-oriented, so that librarians can feel justified in asking for professional development funds to pay for them. It has been very exciting getting Library Juice Academy off the ground, and it has been successful so far. We are always looking for new instructors to offer online classes of two- or four-weeks in duration, so if there is something you would like to teach then please go ahead and contact us.

There is another activity into which to enlist your help regarding Library Juice Academy. In just the past few days we have launched the Sponsor a Librarian program, which is intended to help unemployed librarians pay for their continuing education, in order to keep their skill set fresh. Details about this are on the Library Juice Academy website, but to summarize, the way it works is that unemployed or underemployed librarians can create profiles on the Sponsor a Librarian site indicating what classes they want to take, and other librarians, or friends or family, can donate funds to pay for these classes. It’s premised on the sense that the library profession is a community that helps its members. You can participate in this by creating a profile, if you are unemployed, or by donating funds to sponsor an unemployed librarian to take classes (once the profiles have been posted to the site, which should be soon). We hope that this proves to be a helpful service.

In other Library Juice Academy news, soon into the new year we hope to begin offering one or more webinar series, the nature of which is currently under wraps. You can keep up to date on Library Juice Academy news by following the twitter feed mentioned later, or by subscribing to email updates on the website.

Also happening now are the last weeks and days of our campaign to “unglue” Lauren Pressley’s book, So You Want To Be a Librarian. We are working with Unglue.it to crowd-fund a creative-commons licensing of the ebook version of Lauren’s book, so that it can be freely accessible to college students, recent grads, and career-changers who are considering going into librarianship. Our goal for the campaign is to raise $9000, and we are only about 22% of the way there with a deadline of December 31st. That doesn’t seem very good, but this kind of campaign often has the bulk of its donations in the home stretch. We hope you will consider donating to this campaign. Donations will be acknowledged in the new e-version of the book, with generous donations earning more verbose and prominent thanks in the new acknowledgments section. Donating on behalf of someone else or on behalf of a cause that will be acknowledged might make a good holiday gift.

On the publishing side, an accomplishment in 2012 that we want to highlight is the long-awaited release of the electronic version of Alternative Publishers of Books in North America (APBNA), compiled by Byron Anderson. The book’s seven prior editions have been published by a number of publishing houses, including ours for the sixth edition. Many people who saw the book had the same question to ask: Why isn’t this on the web? In response to that question, we started working with Byron, and also with the Alternative Press Center, to create a new electronic resource. The Alternative Press Center (APC), cooperating with the Independent Press Association, published three editions of Annotations: A Guide to the Independent, Critical Press. Annotations was a guide to periodicals in the same way that APBNA was a guide to book publishers. Working with Byron Anderson and with Chuck D’Adamo of APC, we combined the two resources into a searchable database that lives on the Library Juice Press website, with the new title, Alternatives in Print. The database will be updated regularly by Byron and the APC, when we get the editing interface done (it is in the works, as I keep promising them). This is a very useful free resource, for collection development or for shopping your work if you are an author. We think you should list it in your catalog for your patrons to find.

2012 was relatively slow for releasing new titles, but the titles we did release were good ones. On the Library Juice Press imprint, we released Greening Libraries, which is a guide to green and sustainable practices in libraries, edited by Monika Antonelli and Mark McCullough. We also released Wayne Bivens-Tatum’s Libraries and the Enlightenment, which is an enlightening read, if I may say, about the history of libraries and the ideas surrounding their development, primarily in the 18th century.

Bivens-Tatum’s book is now under contract to be translated into Japanese and published by the Kyoto Institute for Library and Information Science. 2012 saw two other new translation agreements, both with Brazilian publishers and both on archival-studies topics. John Ridener’s From Polders to Postmodernism: A Concise History of Archival Theory, published by Litwin Books, is being translated into Brazilian Portuguese for publication by Editora da UFF, a university press. Richard J. Cox’s Personal Archives and a New Archival Calling: Readings, Reflections and Ruminations, also published by Litwin Books, is under contract to be translated into Portuguese by Brazilian university press Editora UFMG.

The Litwin Books imprint also released two new titles in 2012. Prophets of the Fourth Estate: Broadsides by Press Critics of the Progressive Era, by Amy Reynolds and Gary Hicks, was released at the beginning of the year. Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century, edited by Lyz Bly and Kelly Wooten, was published mid-year, as the second entry in the Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, with Emily Drabinski as series editor. A third Litwin Books title was canceled, unfortunately after we announced its publication. Richard Cox’s collection of essays about Lester J. Cappon will be published as separate articles in archival studies journals. Dr. Cox’s Series on Archives, Archivists, and Society has not suffered as a result of this, however, and planned titles within it are moving along well.

2012 also saw the launch of our imprint for general readers, Auslander & Fox, with the publication of two titles, the children’s book Allie and the Monster Who Said Blah Blah Blah, and the novella by Ian Stoba, titled, Walt.

Between these three imprints, we presently have 23 projects under contract at various stages of development, including a handful with expected release dates in the first half of 2013. These can be mentioned here, since they should be available fairly soon. We are republishing H. Curtis Wright’s biography of Jesse Shera, which I personally love and which I can say serves me as a personal touchstone. Also on the Library Juice Press imprint we will soon be publishing Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis, edited by Shana Higgins and Lua Gregory, and Informed Agitation: Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond, edited by Melissa Morrone. The most significant title to date from Library Juice Press may also reach press by mid year, a reference book titled, The Library Juice Press Handbook of Intellectual Freedom: Concepts, Cases and Theories, edited by Mark Alfino and Laura Koltutsky. This book has been years in the works and is nearing completion. On the Litwin Books imprint we are also expecting titles in the first half of 2013. Also several years in the works is The Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader, edited by Patrick Keilty and Rebecca Dean. This will be a major work that we think will serve as a point of reference for the field. Also in the first half of the new year will be Piracy: Leakages from Modernity, edited by Martin Fredriksson and James Arvanitakis; Queers Online: LGBT Digital Practices in Libraries, Archives, and Museums, edited by Rachel Wexelbaum; Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive, by Alana Kumbier; and Digital Identity Narratives, by Stacey Koosel. In the works on the Auslander & Fox imprint are a coffeetable/reference book about secessionist and nationalist separatist movements by Chris Roth, and a new translation of Voltaire’s play, Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet, which we expect to be controversial and a conversation-starter.

As always, we invite book proposals and manuscript submissions within our editorial scope.

2012 saw another development that we did not announce to the extent that it warranted. We enlisted Alison Lewis as Chief Acquisitions Editor for the Library Juice Press imprint. We work closely with Alison regarding many aspects of the business, as well as with two others who deserve mention, Emily Drabinski and Martin Wallace.

As a final bit of news, we now have someone handline Twitter posts. We had not been participating on Twitter the way a lot of librarians and academics like to do, and decided to rectify that. So, now we are twittering, with the help of Halsted Bernard, who is known to many on the librarian’s internet as “Cygnoir.” Halsted has run the “Library Lovers” Livejournal for over ten years, and has been following Library Juice and Library Juice Press throughout that time, so she is well placed to do this for us. We are using the @litwinbooks handle for the Litwin Books imprint now, instead of for everything, and we have added the handles @LibJuicePress and @LibJuiceAcademy in addition, so add those to your feed if you would like to be kept up to date in this way.

Some of you know that I started Library Juice Press and Litwin Books while I was working as a librarian at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and continued it as I entered the doctoral program in information studies at UCLA in the Fall of 2011. A major development in 2012, in my life anyway, has been that I left the phd program in order to devote all of my time to Litwin Books, Library Juice Press, and related endeavors. This was a difficult decision but in retrospect rather an obvious one, given the demands of the months ahead on the publishing front and with Library Juice Academy.

Watch our blog for news about a party in Chicago during ALA Annual, and stop by and say hello.

Rory Litwin
President, Litwin Books, LLC

The Unglue.it campaign for Lauren Pressley’s book, So You Want To Be a Librarian, is in its home stretch, which is where the most donations to these campaigns typically come in (so there is still a chance that we will reach our goal). I wanted to mention one thing about the campaign. The free, “unglued” e-book will have some pages where the donors are acknowledged, at the end. The structure for acknowledging donations is as follows:

• $25 and up: Your name in the acknowledgements section of the unglued ebook under “Supporters”.
• $50 and up: Your name & profile link in the acknowledgements section of the unglued ebook under “Benefactors”.
• $100 and up Your name, profile link, & a dedication of your choice in the acknowledgements section of the unglued ebook under “Bibliophiles”.

This idea comes from Eric Hellman of the Unglue.it project, and I think it is a good idea. I hope we will have lots of acknowledgments to make….

You can buy gift certificates from Library Juice Press and Litwin Books (and Auslander & Fox as well). You can pay for a gift certificate in an amount of your choosing with funds in your PayPal account or with a credit card.

   

We have enlisted a helper to handle our Twitter presence, so now we will be tweeting and responding at a decent clip, from @litwinbooks, @LibJuicePress, and @LibJuiceAcademy. For readers who don’t know what those three things are, Litwin Books is the publishing company and the imprint that handles mainly scholarly books in media studies, archives, information studies, library history, and related subjects; Library Juice Press publishes books for an audience of librarians and library students, i.e. professional reading, and Library Juice Academy offers online classes for professional development purposes for librarians and other library workers. Our Twitter specialist is Halsted Bernard, known for many years on the web as Cygnoir. Follow these feeds for updates on what we are doing and what we are interested in. You can also get questions answered and generally interact. Feel free to help us out with your suggestions and feedback. Thanks!