Back on the Beat

I pulled off a hat trick of stories last week, all on the library/publishing beat. For Slate’s Future Tense, I wrote about “The Copyright Mavericks,” including the Internet Archive’s Sonny Bono Memorial Collection and other recent library-driven experiments in freeing up scanned and in-copyright content for library patrons to research and enjoy. For EdSurge, I recapped the Ithaka Next Wave 2017 gathering of top library and higher-ed folk, at which Clay Shirky shared the excellent insight that students tend to use general-purpose tools (think Google Docs) rather than boutique ed-tech solutions. And for the Princeton Alumni Weekly, I profiled the career and publishing philosophy of Peter J. Dougherty, who recently stepped down as the director of Princeton University Press. Three very different stories, three great assignments. It’s good to be back, again, on this particular beat.

(Photo note: This keen-looking owl has nothing to do with this blog post, really, except that I snapped him while in NYC for the Ithaka conference. He makes a pretty good library/publishing mascot.)