Page Proofs

Oh, dear.  It's been more than a month since I posted anything.  Here's where I should provide a rundown of all of the activities -- writing, literary, and other -- that have filled up the days since March 12.  Unfortunately, I've just been living my life.  There was a trip to Philly and a birthday, some library visits for an evaluation project and two strange post-modern opera productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walkyrie.  Stuff like that.  

But now things are moving again on the writing front.  I've got page proofs for the long article on "Library Services for Children" for the new edition of the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science.  I felt good about this piece.  Given the constraints of the genre, it was both informative and literate.  There were relatively few of those dreaded author queries, and most were easily handled.  Yes, citation number 32 was the same as reference 8.  Yes, the photo captions were correct.  It was easy enough to provide the full names for the acronyms IFLA and IMLS and to correct one URL.  But then the production guy -- located in India, thanks to the wonders of editorial outsourcing -- wanted me to confirm the page numbers for the reference to William I. Fletcher's classic 1876 report on library service to children.  Everybody cites this, including me.  But do they include the page numbers?  No, they do not.  It took an hour or more of googling and checking sources before I finally found another citation with the page numbers I had used originally.  Yes, I know.  I should request the original book from remote storage at the UCLA Library and eyeball it for myself.  But I can't make myself do it.  Surely it's right there on pages 412 to 418, just like I said the first time.

In other publishing news, ALA Editions has sent my ms. out for copyediting.  And the marketing department has decided on a title:  Twenty-first Century Kids, Twenty-first Century Libraries.  I'm not sure what I think about that.  In some ways, it would have been a better title for the first book.   I'm hoping they can do a better job with the cover than they did with the two printings of that one.