Tuesday, May 22, 4:00-5:00pm
Room: Ski-U-Mah Room
Presenters: Valerie Horton and Matt Lee, Minitex; Shane Nackerud, University of Minnesota Libraries
Description: Bowker reported there were 786,935 self-published ISBN’s registered in 2016. The Minnesota library community decided it was time for libraries to address this creative outpouring at a statewide level. An innovative library partnership of academic, public, and a consortia joined together to launch a book creation system (Minnesota Library Publishing Project) and a discovery system (MN Writes MN Reads). Working with a statewide consortia, Minitex, this unique partnership of academic and public Minnesota libraries provides leadership in managing the self-publishing phenomena. The academic community has funded a geolocated, fully-functional version of Pressbooks at no cost to every author in the state. We have also created a large, active community-of-interest to share training, information, and tools. The public library community has launched MN Writes MN Reads, an online collection of self-published titles from MN authors that are available in library catalog’s statewide. This program will highlight what we have learned in attempting to manage author-support and providing access to self-published titles in libraries at a statewide level.