Mixing Oil and Water: Recipes for Press-Library Collaboration

Drawing on my informal survey of press directors from the Association of American University Presses I contend that effective and sustainable publishing collaborations between research libraries and scholarly presses should be based on organizational interests and have the following characteristics: ongoing communication, clearly articulated expectations, an identified audience, financial projections, schedules, and knowing when to quit. I have been interested in publishing collaborations between research libraries and scholarly presses for some time—though self-interest is a more appropriate characterization. Several years ago Georgetown’s University Librarian, Artemis Kirk, and I decided to post two dozen Georgetown University Press monographs on the library’s digital repository, Digital Georgetown. That seemed to us to be a worthy and worthwhile intersection of aims: initially the library wanted content for its repository in the field of linguistics, which is a significant field of research at the university; the press wanted to give some of our deep backlist titles renewed visibility. Further, the library wanted to generate interest in the repository itself, ramping up holdings, while the press wanted to generate potential interest in sales via a “buy” button on each title, one that led readers back to the press’s website—though given the esoteric nature of these titles we did not expect significant revenue. In the context of a strong relationship between a university library and a university press, this was and remains a modest and interesting collaboration. I am using the term interest intentionally and repeatedly at the outset—six times thus far— because I have become convinced that any meaningful collaboration between research libraries and scholarly presses must begin by holding the promise of satisfying self-interests. That is not the way we typically characterize our motivations, but recall that the linguistic root of the noun “interest” is “to concern” and also “in between.” And that seems entirely appropriate. Publishing collaborations motivated by guilt, or designed to satisfy the dean or the provost, or responding to a vague sense of community or university or moral obligation that we should climb on board and invest staff time and dollars because everyone else seems to be doing it, will very likely not result in effective, sustainable collaborations. About a month ago, in anticipation of this panel, I informally surveyed directors of the Association of American University Presses about their collaborations with their libraries. I asked directors to tell me two things: first, what kinds of publishing collaborations worked, and why; and second, how they measured success. I received a small but reasonable number of responses, in the rest of my time I want to summarize the main themes or characteristics of what undergirds these collaborations. I will not explore specific collaborations themselves, of which there are many fascinating