Menu:
Creating Library Juice
by Rory Litwin
When I was first asked to contribute a piece about my experiences editing and publishing Library Juice for this issue on writing for publication, I was somewhat skeptical. What you read below may be somewhat different than the rest of the articles in the issue, but my experiences editing and publishing Library Juice for the past three years do offer a unique perspective on the library publishing experience.
While I write original editorials in Library Juice only rarely, I think that some of the things I have learned in starting, writing for, editing and publishing Library Juice might be interesting to readers. I also want to tell you about how Library Juice offers a possible vehicle for publishing your own work (depending on its nature) or for publicizing librarians' self-published works.
At the time of this writing, Library Juice has about 1500 email subscribers plus another couple of hundred who read it on the web. This is about the same number who receive the SRRT Newsletter (http://libr.org/SRRT/ for more information), a print publication. Counterpoise, a quarterly review journal of the alternative press, formerly published by SRRT's Alternatives In Print Task Force and soon to be independent, has between two and three hundred subscribers. Free Pint, an electronic newsletter on Internet resources published out of England, has over 10,000 subscribers.
It might be argued that circulation figures for an email publication can't be compared to circulation figures for print publications, because email is so often deleted without being read. Unfortunately, the same is equally true of print publications -- most people skim through magazines and journals and pick out the bits they want to read, putting the item back on the shelf or in their personal collection, where it can be returned to later (or just tossed out). While the Library Juice email messages people receive are mostly eventually tossed out, each issue is archived on the web. Back issues can be retrieved via the on-site search engine, in a web search, through an index like Index Morganagus (an index of online LIS serials), or via direct links. So, Library Juice and other electronic publications may be no less ephemeral than print publications.
The reason I make these comparisons is to show what an efficient way the Internet can be of disseminating ideas -- when it is used well. From the time I started Library Juice (in January, 1998) to the present, it has only cost a small amount of money to operate and has generally demanded less than ten hours a week of work. This includes the selection of items to include (which I mostly collect via email -- from numerous discussion lists and directly from contributors), pasting together each weekly message of 35 to 40K, marking up an HTML version for the website and updating the table of contents and the collections of weekly quotes and home pages, as well as the main page. The Library Juice web site shares server space with several other projects I handle for various organizations on libr.org, so the $18.95 a month I give to the web hosting company is a great value.
This investment of time and energy has paid off. Library Juice has become a great tool for professional networking, both for myself and my contributors. It is also good to know that I have a voice when I find that I have something to say to the library community (although having a voice can also be dangerous).
What I think is cool about all this is that I built Library Juice from scratch simply by acting like a librarian. I didn't start out with a business plan or any intention of making money. I started it because I was the guy on my library school's listserv who was incessantly posting "items of interest," some of them overtly political. When I realized how much I was hated by a few list members, I faced the fact that it was unfair of me to "publish" to a captive audience. I invited my classmates to sign up for a weekly digest of the material I collected. With an initial subscriber list of 80 or so people, Library Juice was born.
It has changed little since that time. There is an increasing amount of original material (as opposed to the announcements and discussion threads that still make up the bulk of it), but it has stayed thematically the same. The niche I have carved out for myself is librarianship with a liberal/radical orientation, or librarianship with a cause. This is a rich vein to mine, and I get great satisfaction in facilitating communication about the things that matter to me. (It would be a false impression, however, to think that everything in Library Juice is political. Much of it is simply practical and applicable to a variety of ends within librarianship. A good deal of it is also simply questioning to provoke thought and challenge assumptions.)
There are many other niches to be carved out, room for more publications, with different angles and different forms. While Library Juice is not a peer-reviewed, scholarly publication, and therefore might not help me move along the tenure track, it is a professional activity, and is significant in that regard. Anyone can build a publication of this kind and make it work for them. It is all a matter of pursuing your interests.
If you have an article, rant, or bibliography that you would like to distribute to the library community, consider submitting it to Library Juice. I am also interested in bringing aboard regular contributors who have ideas for columns or interesting critical perspectives. Please email me at Rory@libr.org.
Library Juice can be accessed online at http://libr.org/Juice