Deadlines

It’s close to the end of another year and what a year 2020 has been! Like Queen Elizabeth once said about another year — The Annus horribilis!

Change is good much of the time. But the fact that the Charleston Conference has gone virtual and we are rearranging Against the Grain has got me thinking about the good old times. Still, it has not been as difficult as we imagined — at least for those of us on the front end. Those on the back end (Toni, Leah, Caroline, Joshua, Matt and more) know that it wasn’t easy and still isn’t. Pathable is an excellent platform but there is still a lot to learn or figure out. Pathable does have a happiness coach which helps a lot!

This issue of ATG is a great one. Matthew ismail and Steven Weiland focus on the trend toward Short books. Stanford Briefs, Forerunners, SpringerBriefs, Palgrave Pivot, the return of the pamphleteer,

Letters to the Editor

Send letters to <kstrauch@comcast.net>, phone 843-509-2848, or snail mail: Against the Grain, Post Office Box 799, Sullivan’s Island, SC 29482. You can also send a letter to the editor from the ATG Homepage at http://www.against-the-grain.com.

Dear Editor:

I was so shocked and saddened by the news about bill Hannay. His passing is an incredible loss. I didn’t know him very well but he was always outgoing, cheerful and very friendly whenever we spoke. His remarkable knowledge of the law as it relates to libraries and intellectual property rights was evident when he spoke at the conference. And of course, bill’s unmatched talent and creativity enabled him to both teach and entertain all of us in such unique and memorable ways. His part in the Long Arm of the Law sessions was always a highlight during every conference. He had a special gift for making what could be dry and complicated topics come alive to his audience. As you aptly noted, bill is irreplaceable.

Thank you for the heartfelt announcement you released. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been, but you struck the exact right tone. I know that you and bruce feel his loss deeply. Please accept my condolences for the loss of your good friend.

Sincerely, Tom v. Gilson (Associate Editor, Against the Grain) <gilsont@cofc.edu>

AGAiNST THE GRAiN DEADLiNES vOLuME 32 & 33 — 2020-2021

2020 Events

ALA Midwinter

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Dec. 2020-Jan. 2021 11/05/20 11/23/20

2021 Events

Annual Report, ACRL MLA, SLA, Book Expo ALA Annual Reference Publishing Charleston Conference ALA Midwinter

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February 2021 01/05/21 01/19/21

April 2021 02/18/21 03/11/21

June 2021 04/01/21 04/22/21

September 2021 06/10/21 07/08/21

November 2021 08/12/21 09/02/21 Dec. 2021-Jan. 2022 11/04/21 11/22/21

FOR MORE iNFORMATiON CONTACT

Toni Nix <justwrite@lowcountry.com>; Phone: 843-835-8604; Fax: 843-835-5892; USPS Address: P.O. Box 412, Cottageville, SC 29435; FedEx/UPS ship to: 398 Crab Apple Lane, Ridgeville, SC 29472. the discipline of a Brevity and Maria van Zuylen and her short books.

We held over several special reports on Librarian engagement, distribution of core responsibilities and the LYRASiS Diversity Report. Our Op Ed talks sbout ALA and how it’s for more than librarians, Jim O’Donnell talks about the opportunities we have to make everything digital. Our interview is with Khal Rudin of Adam Matthew Digital.

Our book review section has many book reviews, and the charming booklover. Legally Speaking is about new developments in the internet Archive lawsuit and Questions & Answers has several issues that require our attention.

We have new column editors for Let’s Get Technical, Kyle banerjee and Susan J. Martin who write about Linked Data: Old Wine in A New bottle and a new case studies column by Steve Rosato.

Meyer Kutz talks about the awesomely wonderful, one-of-a-kind Karen Hunter. Karen was a great woman and librarian!! I remember when she came to the very first Fiesole Retreat in Fiesole Italy. The wonderful John Tagler was a real gentleman to help her get around!

See you all virtually in Charleston real soon. — Yr. Ed.

Rumors

from page 1

panel focused on artificial intelligence, copyright, and privacy. The session was summed up by Peter brantley. The session is archived at https://www.buchmesse. de/node/351586.

Meanwhile, the 2020 Charleston Conference is moving along very well on the Pathable Platform which uses Zoom. We already have vendor showcase exhibitors and over 2000 registrants! Leah Hinds is to be commended hugely for ALL of the work that she has put into getting both the Frankfurt and Charleston Conference virtual meetings together! Hip Hip Hooray for Leah! The Charleston Conference program is here: https://2020charlestonconference.pathable.co/agenda. continued on page 12

what became a very successful series in research methods. The “little green” and “little blue” books, as they were called (by the publisher and users alike), offered authoritative and accessible accounts of methodological essentials (SAGE, 2015). They became handy resources for learning enough about a research method to apply it to practice. Brief was better. And in 2015 with SAGE Swifts the company joined the list of publishers offering books that were longer than the green and blue books but shorter than the conventional research monograph.

In effect, SAGE too proposes that there is no ideal length for a scholarly publication. Publishers and scholars are experimenting together with “inbetween” forms. Each SAGE Swift carries this statement of what the series offers beyond the conventional length of the journal article, while reassuring scholars about legitimacy in the academic reward system: “SAGE Swifts aim to give authors speedy access to academic audiences through digital first publication, space to explore ideas thoroughly, yet at a length which can be readily digested, and the quality stamp and reassurance of peer review.” For SAGE, speed counts, as in practically everything we do today. The quickened pace in the digital age is a sign, for some readers and critics, of the “accelerated academy” (Vostal, 2016). SAGE claims that its Swifts offer learning that can be “readily digested in a culture that expects information at the click of a button.”

While it stands by the monograph (Cambridge UP and Oxford UP, 2019), the Cambridge university Press is also demonstrating the utility of alternative formats. It now has a series of short books of 20,000 to 30,000 words. Elements are described as “original, concise, authoritative, and peer reviewed.” And they are “regularly updated and conceived from the start for a digital environment.” The CuP website offers guidance for prospective authors, including attention to marketing and registering the unusual publishing format on a CV and for annual review.

Will the conventional academic reward system recognize such work with the enthusiasm that scholars are bringing to new publishing opportunities is one question to be asked about the short book phenomenon. Another is: Will libraries accept the publishers’ case for the timeliness of inbetween publications, sometimes marketed as subscriptions, and welcome them as part of scholarly collections? Fifty years ago, when print monographs reigned, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing included in its inaugural issue a case for the short book, naming it an “ideal form” for some scholarly purposes. According to William McClung (1969), then at the Princeton university Press, neglect of short books represented a “serious irrationality” among academic publishers. For him, “The essential criterion for academic book publication should be significance, not length. If this principle prevailed, books of all lengths would be published.”

Can we define a short book? Practices vary and there is no agreed upon word or page count. Perhaps the best definition is that a short book is longer than an article and less than a book, or at least the conventional scholarly book, typically about 200 pages. McClung refers to an “intermediate length of writing” which leaves considerable room for different realizations of “short.” The Oxford university Press specifies 35,000 words, about 120 pages of text, for its well-known Very Short Introductions. The series title, with “very,” leaves no room for prospective readers to expect anything else (see Schulz, 2015). The short books being offered by other publishers are sometimes half as long but with no effort in the series titles to suggest that some books are very, very short ones.

For McClung, the economic argument against short books made sense, if that is the only criterion used to estimate their value. Thus, the fixed costs of publishing make it impossible to apply pricing differentials reflecting length and page counts. Nor is it possible, with what is plain about the limits of the audience for scholarly books generally, to reduce prices with the hope, in retail vernacular, of “making it up in volume.” In effect, the first question McClung asks of the short book is: Is it economically sustainable? From the evidence of activity in short book publishing among scholarly and commercial presses, the answer today is yes, reflecting in part the distance from McClung’s analysis and the advent of electronic publishing, though many short books appear in digital and print versions.

But, McClung is more interested in the case against short books reflecting the conventions of academic publishing, or how the image of a book is “fixed” in the scholarly system. “The concept of the long-form book has remained largely unquestioned and thus affects us almost unnoticed. ...[S]hort books are usually expected to be frivolous, superficial, appropriate for gifts, but rarely serious.” McClung asks a second question to overturn such expectations: Are there cognitive advantages for readers in short books? He believed there were, largely because even fifty years ago “the pace of publication has produced readers who read quickly, skim, and select.” The advantage of the short book is that it “can be read as a unit, at a single sitting [of about two hours], as a singular and coherent intellectual experience.” Indeed, as an “ideal form of expository writing [a short book] probably maximizes the richness of content within a length [of about one hundred pages] that can be absorbed by the serious reader under ideal circumstances in a single period.”

The problem of the short book might also be seen as a disciplinary and professional one. Thus, a third implicit question of the short book: What will it mean for the academic reward system? McClung invokes an observation about graduate education, made in the same year of his account of short books, by Henry Riecken, then President of the Social Science Research Council. Riecken (1969) wondered if “too many research problems were ‘thesis sized’ because they are undertaken with that objective in view.” Thus, as McClung puts it, research felt the adverse consequences of “the absence of flexibility that would allow the expansion and contraction of projects as needs dictated.”

Of course, the need addressed by traditional long-form books is for tenure and other academic rewards. The short book (much less in an open access format) presents potential problems in demonstrating research achievement, as in citations and reviews, according to academic and institutional norms. At least that is the conclusion a Chronicle of Higher Education columnist drew from interviews with administrators and scholars. While one acknowledged that the short book “might actually prompt us to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions about productivity and achievement” most anticipated advising younger colleagues to adhere to the long-form tradition, leaving publishing innovation to well established scholars (Cassuto, 2013). Advocates of short books see more than a genre experimentation in the format. There is the opportunity also to influence the method of scholarship itself.

At the very least the short book can offer significant operational change in writing and publishing. The Cambridge continued on page 10

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Short books: An introduction

from page 8

university Press invites contributions to its Elements series by highlighting the novelty of the new format, or “an opportunity to develop a theme in greater detail than is possible in a traditional journal article, yet more concisely than would be expected in a full length book.” There is also the speed of publication after peer review (within 12 weeks of submission of the final manuscript) as well as visibility to individual readers and libraries, the latter as part of “digital collections” marketed by CuP. In fact, the eBook is the primary format, with print “on demand.” But that limit is also presented as an advantage in “platform functionality.” Thus, these short books can be updated annually and can include video and audio files. Cambridge wants “original, cutting edge insights into frontier topics.” One early Elements author told CuP that his book represented “a unique space in which to make a contribution to the literature.”

Minnesota sees its Forerunners as a form of “grey publications that [can] transform authorship” (Kasprzak and Smyre, 2017). “Grey” refers to work — conference presentations, white papers, organizational reports, and “thought in process” digital work that is posted online — that can form the basis of a timely short book. The work is “iterative” and even “drafty,” reflecting what some will see as a publishing heresy in “encouraging authors to become increasingly comfortable with releasing their writing before they’ve perfected it.” Some authors working in the new format see their work that way while for others a short book can be as polished and even perhaps as complete as a longer work according to its scholarly goals. As the profiles and interviews that follow show, innovative publishers and authors are demonstrating that the short book, paradoxically, can have a sizeable role in academic work.

References

Cohen, D. (2019). The books of college libraries are turning into wallpaper. The Atlantic, May 26.

Cambridge university Press and Oxford university Press. (2019). Researchers’ perspectives on the purpose and value of the monograph: Survey results 2019. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Cassuto, L. (2013). The rise of the mini-monograph. Chronicle of Higher Education, August 12.

Colestock, R. (2012). Short-form digital grows at university press. Association of University Presses. Available at: http:// www.aupresses.org/news-a-publications/ aaup-publications/the-exchange/the-exchange-archive/summer-2012/800-shortform-publishing.

Esposito, J. (2012). Short-form publishing – A new content category, courtesy of the Internet. Scholarly Kitchen, September 5: Available at: https:// scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/09/05/ short-form-publishing-a-new-content-category-courtesy-of-the-internet/.

Fitzpatrick, K. (2015). Scholarly publishing in the digital age. In Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (Eds.), Between humanities and the digital. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kasprzak, D. and Smyre, T. (2017). Forerunners and Manifold: A case study in iterative publishing. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 48(2): 90-98.

McClung, W. (1969). The short book. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 1(1): 45-52.

SAGE. (2015). The SAGE story. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Available at: sagepub.com/sites/default/files/ a1501001_sage_story-50_june2015_final_lo-res.pdf.

Schulz, K. (2017). How to be a KnowIt-All: What you learn from the Very Short Introduction series. New Yorker, October 16: 76-80. vostal, F. (2016). Accelerating academia: The changing structure of academic time. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Weiland, S. and ismail, M. (2019). Short books: Context and Case. In bernhardt, b., Hinds, L., Meyer, L. and Strauch, K. (Eds.) Charleston Conference Proceedings, 2018. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press.

Press Clippings — in the News — Carefully Selected by Your Crack Staff of News Sleuths

Column Editor: bruce Strauch (Retired, The Citadel)

Editor’s Note: Hey, are y’all reading this? If you know of an article that should be called to Against the Grain’s attention ... send an email to <kstrauch@comcast.net>. We’re listening! — KS

OnE SPACE OR TwO?

Do you put one space or two at the end of a sentence?

Aged folks who learned on manual typewriters were taught two and are adamant about it. But the younger digital age one-spacers seem to be winning. It has been predicted that two spaces will die out in 10 to 20 years.

Two spaces make it look less cramped. Legal professionals who wade through reams of pages are the loudest defenders. Appellate lawyers prefer it 2-to-1. And a psychology study at Skidmore came down on the side of two spaces as easier to read.

But the Chicago Manual of Style, the American Psychological Association, and the Wall Street Journal favor single space in their style guides. And Microsoft flags two spaces as an error.

But it will take one to two decades to see who wins.

See — James Hookway, “The Typographical Space Race Tightens Up,” The Wall Street Journal, June 4, 2020, p.A1.

deadwood dick Rides again

Libraries spurned dime novels as not literature. 60,000 were printed on cheap paper and not meant to last. Private collectors have given them to libraries including the Library of Congress.

Lest they turn to dust, the National Endowment of the Humanities handed Northern illinois u $350,000 to digitize 4,400 volumes published by New York company Street & Smith. Look for them at dimenovels.org. villanova hosts the website and already has 10,000 of them up.

Horatio Alger is still remembered today for Ragged Dick. Frank Merriwell was a fictional Yale football player who won 900 games at the last moment.

Edward Stratemeyer who started with dime novels, went on to create Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. Sinclair Lewis and upton Sinclair got their start with the dimes.

See — Judith H. Dobrzynski, “A Digital Afterlife for Dime Novels,” The Wall Street Journal, May 30-31, 2020, p.C14.

Let’s Read Movie Music

Jon burlingame, The Music of James Bond (2012) (Michael Caine groaned at all night music making of roommate John barry who wrote the Bond Theme); (2) Henry Mancini, Did They Mention the Music? (1989) (Henry Mancini — “Moon River,” “Peter Gunn Theme,” “Pink Panther Theme”); (3) Nathan Platte, Making Music in Selznick’s Hollywood (2017) (Selznick as dictator and innovator); (4) Jack Sullivan, Hitchcock’s Music (2006) (Hitch as deftest conductor of audience emotions); (5) Fred Karlin, Listening to Movies (1994).

See — Steven C. Smith, “Five Best,” The Wall Street Journal, June 13-14, 2020, p.C8.

Let’s Read HoLLywood Lives

Carlotta Moriti, W.C. Fields and Me (1971) (mistress of the irascible alcoholic W.C. Fields); (2) George Jacobs and William Stadiem, Mr. S.: My Life With Frank Sinatra (2003) (Frank Sinatra’s valet); (3) Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: “Chinatown” and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020); (4) Darcy O’brien, A Way of Life, Like Any Other (1977) (novel about son of alcoholic histrionic actress mother); (5) Angelica Huston, Watch Me (2014) (John Huston’s daughter pens narrative rich in detail). See — Susanna Moore, “Five Best,” Wall Street Journal, May 2-3, 2020, p.C8. (She is the author of the memoir Miss Aluminum.)

Rumors

from page 6

Many exciting things are happening with Charleston Conference colleagues! We will not see Camille Gamboa even virtually because she will be on maternity leave this fall! Camille has been working on the Charleston Communications task force! She will be back as soon as the baby arrives! Happy delivery, Camille!

What a special way for Tony Horava (once a Charleston Conference Director, now retired) to end his career! The Ca-

nadian Research Knowledge Network

(CRKN) is pleased to announce Tony Horava as the recipient of the 2020 Ron

MacDonald Distinguished Service

Award. The award will be presented on October 22, 2020, at a virtual award ceremony as part of the CRKN virtual Conference. For over 30 years, Mr. Horava has contributed to the advancement of scholarly communications and knowledge infrastructure in Canada, while continuously demonstrating vision, integrity, and a passion for collaboration. In 2019, Mr. Horava retired as the Associate University Librarian (Content and Access) at the university of Ottawa, a role he held since January of 2010. https://www.crkn-rcdr.ca/en/conference/crkn-virtual-conference/program/ ron-macdonald-award-ceremony continued on page 36