LPC Blog

The Library Publishing Coalition Blog is used to share news and updates about the LPC and the Library Publishing Forum, to draw attention to items of interest to the community, and to publish informal commentaries by LPC members and friends.

Professional development for library publishers has been a priority for LPC since its initial project phase. We put on lots of fantastic webinars, and of course the Library Publishing Forum can’t be beat, but there is still an unmet need for more comprehensive, structured educational resources for this growing field. Fortunately, as part of the ‘Developing a Curriculum to Advance Libary-Based Publishing‘ project, a stellar team of individuals and organizations has been working for the last year to develop a set of openly-licensed curriculum materials.  This project is a partnership of Educopia, LPC, the Public Knowledge Project, NASIG, and BlueSky to BluePrint, generously funded by the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

We are delighted to announce the release of the first two modules! Each module contains an introduction plus 6-7 “units” that address topics of interest. Each unit includes the following components: a narrative, a slideshow with talking notes, activities for use in a physical or virtual classroom for workshops and courses.

Content

The Content Module covers how library publishers attract, select, edit, manage, and disseminate content. It includes information about how to recruit partners and select content for a program, and how to incorporate diverse voices into each part of the publication process. It also shares information about common production workflows, identifying the resources and staff skills needed to support various editorial strategies and content types.

Authors: Peter Berkery, Executive Director, AAUP; Meredith Babb, Director, University Press of Florida; Jasmine Mulliken, Stanford University Press; Friederike Sundaram, Stanford University Press; Dennis Lloyd, University of Wisconsin Press; Mary Rose Muccie, Director, Temple University Press; Brenna McLaughlin, Director of Marketing & Communications, AAUP

Impact

The Impact Module focuses on how library publishers measure and extend the impact of their work. It covers how to identify and apply specific impact measures for publications, how to assess the performance of a publishing program and publication portfolio, and how to build an engagement strategy and evaluate its effects.

Author: John W. Warren, Head, George Mason University Press and Mason Publishing Group

More about the curriculum

The Library Publishing Curriculum is a suite of synchronous and asynchronous professional development offerings for librarians that are open and free under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license for anyone to offer or adapt. This dynamic, extensible, multimedia curriculum is intended to empower librarians to meet local demands to launch and/or enhance scholarly publishing activities.

The initial curriculum released in 2018 will include four modules that address major competencies in library publishing: Content, Impact, Policy, and Sustainability. Each module has been authored by field experts, and each is roughly the equivalent of a 12 hour “course.”

Curriculum editors: Sarah Lippincott, Independent Scholarly Communications and Digital Scholarship Consultant; Melanie Schlosser, Educopia Institute; Katherine Skinner, Educopia Institute; Hannah Ballard, Educopia Institute; Nancy Maron, BlueSky to BluePrint