Mining for Gold
October 2009
I regularly get the same comment and question when I tell people that I am a book review editor for
Choice magazine (after explaining to those who don’t live in library land just what
Choice is). The comment: wow, so you get to read books all day! (I wish!) The question: how do you decide which books to review? Now
there’s a question! The editorials for August and September addressed the numbers and flow of books and reviews at
Choice, so I am going to address how the books get here in the first place.
The majority of the books arrive automatically from publishers. We have standing agreements with university presses and other scholarly and academic publishers to send copies of each new title in designated subjects as soon as they are published. (Reminder:
Choice only reviews from finished copies of books, not galleys or reader copies.) Beyond that, the six subject editors canvass a wide variety of publisher catalogs; library, review, professional, association, and discipline-specific journals and Web sites; new title lists from book vendors such as Yankee and Blackwell; mainstream newspapers, magazines, and journals; alert services from publishers; and blogs, Web sites, listservs, and discussion groups to identify new titles and resources in the various subject areas, in much the same way that bibliographers once did in most academic libraries.
As the subject editor for anthropology, sociology, and, especially, history, I cover a vast publishing output. Because popular titles in these areas may be reviewed in mainstream venues, I try to scan smaller press and regional publishers and sources to identify gems that the wider media may overlook, always keeping in mind the appropriateness of titles for undergraduate libraries. Often, too, our reviewers--teaching faculty from across the US and Canada--alert editors to important new titles.
Once a title is identified, we check to see if it has already arrived, or if it is published by one of our “automatic” publishers. If the book appears unlikely to arrive automatically,
Choice publishing assistants contact the publisher or organization and request a review copy. Once the book arrives, the appropriate editor’s subject expertise and knowledge of the discipline come into play.
Choice subject editors have a strong disciplinary background and/or library collection development experience in one or more of the subject areas they cover. That knowledge, combined with an awareness of new developments in the discipline and undergraduate curriculum emphases, membership in professional academic associations and/or attendance at conferences, etc., enables the editors to select the most relevant and useful print and electronic titles for review. Editors then match up the book, database, or Web site with one of the 3,000-plus professors and academic librarians in our reviewer pool.
Keeping in mind that
Choice reviews only 25-30 percent of the titles we receive, and that not all publishers respond to review copy requests, it is inevitable that we miss some important titles. But we catch many other titles that may not be reviewed elsewhere, and it is our hope that the titles we review find their way into your collections and enrich the educational experiences of the students and faculty who use your libraries.--LAM
|
