Interscript is hosting a panel event, ‘Publishing the Future,’ covering topics of diversity and inclusivity within the publishing industry as well as digitalisation and the future of academic publishing. With fantastic speakers, including guests from Knights Of, don’t miss your chance to ask the panel your questions and the opportunity to hear their thoughts on the future of the publishing industry. The event is this Thursday so make sure to reserve your seat here!

When:

Thursday, 15 March 2018 from 16:30 to 19:00 (GMT)

Where:

G12, Torrington (1-19)

University College London

Torrington Place, London

London, WC1E 7HB, UK

Organisers:

Interscript is an academic student-led journal and magazine that publishes research and articles on publishing topics. We welcome submissions from professionals, academics, and postgraduate students.

This guest post was written by fellow student, Vicky Joss.

In an endeavour to rediscover the lost art of reading aloud, several UCL Publishing students attended ‘A Night of Reading Aloud’ at Waterstones Gower Street, led by Francesco Dimitri, the author of To Read Aloud. His new book is a curated collection of excerpts from well known (and some lesser known) books that are designed to be read aloud. They are categorised thematically through experiences such as change, pleasure, loss, love and wonder. In becoming the reader, or the listener, you are challenged to remain completely in the present, focusing solely on the words.

The evening started with a little history. Whilst we now consider reading aloud as an activity for a child’s bedtime, it only went out of fashion in the twentieth century. It was so popular with Cuban miners in the nineteenth century that they would pay to have a lector during their working hours! The room was set up in a speed-dating format, and we were told that if we didn’t sit with a stranger we would be moved (gulp). There were three rounds, each one consisting of a reader and a listener. The first was a warm-up round, with an extract under seven minutes. The second was slightly longer, and the listener got to choose their extract this time. The third round was much like the second, except the listener had to wear a blindfold.

The evening was not only interesting, but also surprisingly insightful. Reading is, of course, nothing new to us. Yet reading aloud introduced several new elements. Firstly, it forces a busy mind to stop and simply be present (simultaneously reading and thinking is just not possible. I tried!). As a reader, it was odd to hear my voice shape words in to existence for the sole purpose that this stranger would listen. As a listener, I focused less on their voice and more on shaping the words to form a picture in my head. I had one chance to fully grasp this; there were no pages to look back on to remind myself of crucial details.

Yet perhaps the most surprising part of the evening was that Francesco was right: reading aloud formed a connection with a stranger that completely bypassed any formalities. I talked to my partners about ambitions, politics and their grandchildren without hesitation.

I, for one, am behind this quiet revolution to re-introduce reading aloud to adults as normal once again.

 

So far this term, we’ve been to oodles of events. If you’ve missed out, you can find some event reports (including lovely pictures of Publishing students) in our recent posts. If you’d like more information about any previous or upcoming events, please message one of us and we’ll put you in contact with a helpful someone.

To keep everyone in the loop and make sure we don’t miss anything accidentally, here are some exciting things coming up:

November

18th (-16th Dec): Kingston Children’s Literary Festival – https://www.visitkingston.co.uk/events/kingston-childrens-literary-festival-18-11-2017

20th: SYP London – November Book Club – The Siege by Helen Dunmore https://thesyp.org.uk/london/event/syp-london-november-book-club-the-siege-by-helen-dunmore/

21st: The Ventriloquist’s Daughter: A Talk with Author, Translator and Publisher https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-ventriloquists-daughter-a-talk-with-author-translator-and-publisher-tickets-39693486286?aff=es2

21st: Writing About Conflict with Caroline Brothers and Anita Sethi http://www.bloomsburyinstitute.com/upcoming-events

22nd: SYP November Workshop: Discovering new authors and working with publishers

https://thesyp.org.uk/london/event/syp-november-workshop-discovering-new-authors-and-working-with-publishers-agent/

27th: How are Independent Publishers Shaking Up The Book Industry? http://www.bytethebook.com/events/byte-book-publishing-networking-groucho-club-november

28th: Independent Publisher Conference (I’m not sure we can actually go but it’s maybe worth knowing that it’s happening!)

http://www.ppa.co.uk/Events/IPN2017

28th: An Evening with Sherlock Holmes https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/an-evening-with-sherlock-holmes-tickets-38456798319?aff=es2

30th: Black Women in Publishing https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/black-women-in-publishing-tickets-39685338917

 

December

4th: Eat, Drink and Be Merry! https://bookmachine.org/event/eat-drink-merry/

6th: Jingle & Mingle https://bookmachine.org/event/jingle-mingle/

15th-16th: The 2017 London Children’s Book Fair http://parasol-unit.org/whats-on/education-and-events/the-2017-london-childrens-book-fair/

 

Careers Events

Don’t forget to sign up to any of the careers events that take your fancy at the end of November (all in an email from Sam):

28th: Get into Publishing

29th: Get into Broadcasting: TV, Film & Radio

30th: Journalism Workshop

30th: Get into Marketing, PR & Advertising

 

Finally, please don’t forget that CHRISTMAS IS COMING and there are a crazy amount of festive-themed events in London to make the most of!

 

On Monday 23rd October, past and present students gathered with other lovely people at the rather majestic Stationers’ Hall to attend the inaugural Stevenson lecture. The evening was a celebration of book historian and UCL professor Iain Stevenson (1950-2017) hosted by Bloomsbury Chapter and UCL Publishing. Simon Eliot gave an inspiring talk entitled: ‘Letters, Leaflets, and Lectures: Before and Beyond the Book 1840-1945’ – we learnt lots (including the correlation between pay and height for Victorian male servants) and were reminded of weird and wonderful things (such as the reason for the holes in our front doors).

At the end of the evening, Daniel Boswell presented the U.C.L Stevenson Award 2017. We obviously wanted to know more about the winner and runners up, Claire, Dominic and Sarah – so here is a little insight!

Winner: Claire Ormsby-Potter

A fun fact about yourself:

This question always gives me conniptions because I’m never sure what’s interesting, haha! How about – I actually trained as a teacher after leaving University, but realised that it absolutely wasn’t for me.

What was your favourite moment of the year?

I’m not sure it’s possible to identify a single moment. The whole course was a really great experience for me, and all the opportunities I had as part of it were unbelievable.

What project/piece of work were you most proud of and why?

Probably my Children’s assignment. I got my highest mark for it, and just waxed lyrical about books for ages, interspersed with cartoons I drew. It was a lot of fun!

Runner Up: Dominic Aveiro

A fun fact about yourself: 

Not many people know this about me (…okay, maybe quite a few people do), I used to be in the Metropolitan Police Service…and before you ask, the answer is yes – I have arrested someone.

What was your favourite moment of the year?

This is a hard one for me as there are so many great moments to draw from. Nevertheless, I will have to focus upon a string of moments, or to be more precise, Thursdays. Why were Thursdays so important? Well – not only had the academic week ended for us (though all our classes were great) – it also meant going to the pub! Here, great friendships were forged. Not surprisingly (or perhaps, surprisingly?), the pub was an environment that was highly conducive to communication.

What project/piece of work were you most proud of and why?

Without a shadow of a doubt, my absolute pride and joy was the piece of work I did for Children’s Publishing. I basically designed a DK-inspired Dragon Ball piece on InDesign with the skills I had gained from Publishing Skills. This is the wonderful thing about the Publishing MA – skills are transferable…and encouraged!

 

 

If you want to see what they’re up to now, give them a little follow:

Claire: @okyeahbut

Dom: @DominicAveiro

Sarah: @sjfcarver

Last week (Monday Feb 22nd 2016) we had a visit from expert searcher Phil Bradley, who spoke to us about search, where we are, and where we’re going. This report was written by MA LIS student Cathy Goodin:

Phil Bradley has a mission: to make everyone, especially librarians, see that using Google alone is like trying to answer every question by opening up Encyclopaedia Britannica.

You may know Phil from Cilip Update, where his sunny by-line photo appears beside the “Internet Q&A” column every month. Phil spoke to us in Foster Court on Monday 22nd February and turned out to be a lot less sunny when he got on to the subject of Google.

Because Google is taking advantage of us.

Google knows we all turn to it automatically, so over the years it has gradually reduced its search functionality (what happened to Advanced Search?) knowing that a poorer list of results will make us more likely to click on a piece of advertising instead.

Which makes money for Google.

And making money is the no.1 aim of all search engines. I thought they were in it to help us find information on the internet, but I was wrong.

Phil’s advice? Don’t slavishly use Google for everything. There are a hundred different search engines out there – in fact there are 400,000 of them depending on how you define “search engine” – so get under the hood of a few and learn what they are capable of.

Use Duckduckgo when you want to preserve your privacy. Use Yandex for Boolean, proximity and synonym search functionality. Try Newslookup.com or NewsNow for news, and Zanran for data and statistics. Try a multi search engine such as Trovando for comprehensive results, and SimilarSites to take one good website and find others like it.

You can find a whole collection of search engines on Phil’s website.

Phil also talked about the future of up-to-date information: social media. YouTube, twitter, Facebook, reddit and the like generate so much content every minute that big search engines can’t keep up. Use something like Social Searcher or SocialMention to find out what has happened in the last few minutes. Or follow what your network are talking about with a collation service like Flipboard or News.me.

We are in a transition time. Internet search is changing. People don’t want to look at a website to see what a company or organisation is saying – they want to hear from individuals who are experts in a particular field.

Phil encourages us to find our own experts, and then to become experts – to post as knowledgeable people using whatever the social media platform of the moment might be, until we ourselves are the go-to sources of information for others.

 

Author: Cathy Goodin, 29 Feb 2016

 

Phil Bradley’s slides can be downloaded here

Following Simone’s post about our class visit to St Bride’s Printing Library, I thought I would share our experience learning about different print techniques using materials from the UCL Art Museum. 

The practical session on the methods of printing led by Curatorial Assistant and print artist J. Yuen Ling Chiu (@yuenlingchiu) was an hour’s worth of hands on experience with printed pictures. Have you ever looked at a print and wondered how it was made? Well wonder no further with this module session.

We started by each choosing a printers tool which was used to make one or more of the printed images displayed around the room. After a few minutes of studying the images, we were asked to guess which tools were used to make each of the prints. Firstly we looked at some woodcut prints, made with a ‘u’ tool, which is used by scraping lines in the wood. This imprints very defined straight lines which are tapered at the ends where the tool enters and leaves the wood. The ink is then rolled onto the remaining sections of wood to create the print. This is known as relief printing. We also looked at copper engraving and etching (in which acid is used to cut into the metal).

One of the forms of etching I found most interesting was the aquatint, where a cloud of blue dust is thrown into the air and left to settle onto a piece of copper sheet. Wax is then placed on certain sections, before the sheet is dipped into acid which burns through the dust to leave white flecks on the print. The print is then built up with layers of wax and acid to for the picture.

Another interesting technique is mezatint, where the surface starts very black, and layers of white are created on top using a tool which had grooves running along the edge, ending in little teeth. These teeth were used to ‘smoosh’ (technical word!) the dots together by rocking the tool from side to side.

After this quick induction we were set loose on a new set of prints, discussing which method of printing was used to create each print. On the whole I like to think we got more than half of them right between us.

If this doesn’t convince you that Historical Bibliography is a good optional module to choose, then the seminars on collation and quasi-facsimiles will top the balance! I am looking forward to the remaining seminars that this module has to offer.

Editorial Note: UCL Art Museum is closed for refurbishment until April 2015, but its programme of teaching and public engagement is continuing off-site. We are very grateful to J. Yuen Ling Chiu and Dr Andrea Fredericksen (UCL Art Museum Curator) for delivering this regular session for INSTG012 in the Haldane Room this year. You can find details of the Museum’s ongoing programme of events on its website. Staff also contribute to @UCLMuseums on twitter, UCL Museums and Collections facebook page, and the Museums & Collections playlist on UCLTV on YouTube. — Anne Welsh, INSTG012 Historical Bibliography Module Coordinator.

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Nikki Gregory (@NikkiG434) is a full-time student on the MA Library and Information Studies.

Image: Anne Welsh.

Note: the appearance of the byline on this post is auto-generated, indicating that it was posted by Anne Welsh. Apart from the editorial note, Nikki Gregory is the sole author of this piece.

On Thursday 14th November the Publishing MA students took a literary theme and combined it with baking and dressing up to raise money for Children in Need.

As well as a book-themed Bake Sale in Foster Court, there was a course-wide fancy dress competition which yielded creative and enthusiastic contributions. Jayne Osborne and Jane Sceales won the competition with their take on Fred and George Weasley, complete with bandaged ears, ginger wigs and matching Hogwarts jumpers. The duo won a Limited Edition Tracey Emin “Books Are My Bag” tote, a “Books Are My Bag” t-shirt and a copy of “The Coat Route” by Meg Lukens Noonan, as kindly donated by the UCL Publishing teaching staff.

Thanks to the hard work and enthusiasm from everyone involved in the running the Bake Sale and fancy dress competition, and of course the generosity of donators, UCL Publishing raised over £175 for Children in Need. The amount will be included in tonight’s Grand Total on the Official Children in Need Appeal Show, which airs tonight from 7.30pm on BBC1.

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Amy Davies (@amy_davies) is studying for her MA Publishing.

Note: the appearance of the byline on this post is auto-generated, indicating that it was posted by Anne Welsh. Amy Davies is the sole author of this piece.

On Monday 13^th October, 2014 as part of our Historical Bibliography module, half of the class visited St. Bride’s Printing Library on Fleet Street, while the other half visited the British Library. As I was part of the group that visited St. Bride’s, I felt compelled to write about the experience there as it clearly impacted on the learning objectives of the course.

St. Bride’s Library, which opened its doors to the public as a printing school in 1895, is part of the St. Bride Foundation. On arrival we were met by our facilitators, Bob and Mick, who both had no hesitation in describing and demonstrating some of the collections. We were shown excerpts of the Catnach, Kindersley as well as the Gill Collections, all of which were unique in their own right.

Of particular interest to me was the Catnach Collection as his broadsides are forerunners of tabloids in the United Kingdom. From the plain and simple to the gory, this collection is quite remarkable and is well preserved along with the other collections.

Despite this wealth of materials, the aspect of the visit that peaked our interest the most was that of the printing press room. This room which could most certainly also be described as a small museum, has working original models of hand presses used between the 18^th and 19^th centuries. These include the Columbian Press (1822), the Albion Press (1828), and the Stanhope Press (1830). The Library is also home to an immaculate wooden Compositor’s Box from Oxford University Press.

Additionally, we were shown some wood engraving techniques whereby blocks of wood were engraved with various illustrations, placed between text and hand pressed during the Victorian era. Our visit then closed with each of us hand pressing selected designs given to us by Rob and Mick.

Having read and researched 19^th century newspapers from Trinidad and Tobago over time, I never actually thought of the actual process that went into printing. This visit to St. Brides was truly an enlightening one and can serve to be a true asset to anyone wishing to delve into the field of Rare Books and Special Collections Librarianship or to become knowledgeable in the history of the printing press on a whole. For further information on the library please visit http://www.sbf.org.uk/library or follow them on twitter (@stbridelibrary) or facebook.

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Simone Charles (@libraryesque) is studying for her MA LIS, specialising in Bibliography, Book History and Cataloguing.

Note: the appearance of the byline on this post is auto-generated, indicating that it was posted by Anne Welsh. Simone Charles is the sole author of this piece.

Looking for a sugar fix at lunchtime? Call into Foster Court (opposite UCL Science Library) today for the MA Publishing students’ Children in Need bake sale:

Editorial Note: We are grateful to Sian Prosser, Librarian of the Royal Astronomical Society for hosting this Induction Week visit. – Anne Welsh, Programme Director MA Library and Information Studies.

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During our induction week, some of the new LIS students were lucky enough to visit the Royal Astronomical Society Library. The Society was formed in 1820, and gained its Royal Charter in 1831. The Society’s aim was, and still is, to promote the study of astronomy and related disciplines. The Society has been collecting books, manuscripts and other works since its inception, which form the basis of the Society’s collections today. The Society’s home is at Burlington House in Piccadilly, where it is neighboured by the Royal Academy of Arts, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Linnean Society, among others.

 

We were shown round the beautiful building by the Society’s Librarian, Sian Prosser. She told us about the history of the collections and the challenges of managing the Society’s archive and rare book spaces. We were shown the wonderful wood-panelled reading rooms which house some of the collections. The Society holds regular talks and events in these rooms of the library. One of the highlights for me was seeing the Rare Book Room which holds, among many other treasures, a piece of wood from the apple tree in Isaac Newton’s garden. Sian very kindly laid out some unique items from the collection for us to see, including Astronomicum Caesareum by Peter Apian, published in 1540. The book contains many brightly-coloured, moving discs which can be used to calculate the position of planets. There was also a first-edition of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which revolutionised astronomy at the time of its publication in 1543.

 

After a look at the treasures, we sat down to talk shop! It was fascinating to hear about the role of the librarian in an well-established organisation such as the Royal Astronomical Society. Sian talked to us about the challenges of being a sole practitioner in terms of planning and managing your workload, but also about the opportunities that can be gained by broadening your skill set, taking on new challenges and establishing new professional knowledge and networks: in this case, by learning about the distinguished history of the Society and getting to know current members. She told us about some of her potential plans for the future, which include some retrospective cataloguing (the Library holds 300 current periodicals as well as over 3000 ceased journal titles), liaising with other astronomy libraries and archives internationally to map shared collections of journals and to perhaps plan for digitisation of some titles, and extend the Society’s already impressive outreach activities around its collections. She also mentioned that as a sole practitioner, having a professional support network of librarians to talk to (both in the other libraries at Burlington Place and in the wider world) was very helpful – something to bear in mind as we continue to build our professional networks! In all, it was a fascinating and inspiring visit to a beautiful and unique institution. Thank you very much to Sian for inviting us!

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Maddie House (@thevonfresh) is studying part-time for her MA LIS, while working in an academic library.

Image: Anne Welsh. Used with permission.