Over the past 13+ years, I’ve had the distinct privilege of working with thousands of talented librarians around the world because of MarcEdit.  Its opened doors, opportunities, and honestly, sometimes made me look a lot smarter than I am.  I feel indebted to a library community that has encouraged me to cultivate my interests and has given me an opportunity to do something that I thoroughly enjoy.  So, I want to give something back, to say thank you for the time you’ve invested in me, by allowing me to invest a little bit of time in all of you.  This book is my gift back to a community that has given so much to me.

It’s also an experiment of sorts.  Over the past year, I’ve had a number of offers from publishers to take this concept and turn it into a formally published work.  I like the idea, I enjoy writing, and it’s a medium well understood by promotion and tenure committees. But, the idea left me feeling a bit like a hypocrite.  I’ve invested time and energy evangelizing the significant benefits to be had from making one’s work more open.  I’ve called on other faculty to take risks within the promotion and tenure process, and experiment with what it means to publish content.  I’ve done this from behind the safety of my own tenure.  However, having jumped back on the promotion and tenure treadmill, I found myself becoming more conservative in how I was interacting with faculty and how I was approaching my own research. That bothered me, so I’m making the choice to think differently about this publication and about how to measure the impact of my work.  Will it work out?  Who knows?  But, this is what we do as researchers.  We experiment. We try new things. We evaluate the results.   My hope is that by publishing this document out in the open, the final product will be richer than it would have been otherwise. This will reach more people, have a wider impact, and be a living, breathing document that can be revised and updated as the work we do in libraries continues.  I hope this is a little subversive, and causes people to re-evaluate what it means to publish their research, and how we reward people for their intellectual output.  It’s a journey that I hope we can take together, and I look forward to it.

One of the benefits of looking at more non-traditional publishing options, is the freedom to experiment with different formats and ways of conveying information.  In fact, it’s one of the things that I find exciting about this project: the opportunity to look at mixing media formats together to create a richer experience for the reader.  I may not always succeed, but that is certainly the intent.  The format of this text will be broken into “Books”, which will each cover a high level concept related to the program.  These “Books” will be separated into chapters which will address specific topics related to the broader “Book”.   Within each chapter, I will endeavor to include a road map detailing the topics to be discussed.  Peppered throughout these discussions will be Tips and Tricks.