Crawford - The librarians guide to micropublishing: helping patrons and communities use free and low-cost publishing tools to tell their stories

You have genealogy enthusiasts who want to publish their family histories, but the results might only be interesting to a dozen family members. At least 1 percent of your patrons, probably more, have family histories or genealogies theyd like to see in print form. Your library can help.

Beyond formal family histories and genealogies, more and more of your patrons may be gathering remembrances worth keeping and sharing: great-great-great-grandmothers narrative of crossing the plains to California or Utah. Great-great grandfathers story of growing up a slave and becoming a trusted member of the community, or mothers memories of the Civil Rights Movement. Grandfathers story of war, sacrifice, and change in the first half of the 20th century. Your generations stories of growing up with technology, being in garage bands, coping with the conflicts between social networks and privacy. Some of these are powerful family and community narratives worth preserving in book form. Your library can help.

Your community is surrounded by parks and wilderness preserves with scores of hiking trailsand more hiking and interesting walking routes in the urban non-wilderness. Members of a local hiking group have gathered comments on the most interesting (and least known) trails, including drawings and information to share those trails with other hikers. Chances are nobody outside your community and neighboring communities will care, but those within your community might find this a great resource. Your library can help.

A group of teens in your community forms a writing club to inspire one anothers creativity and review one anothers prose and poetry. At the end of the first year, they have a collection of the best works theyd love to have bound copies ofand so would their parents. Your library can help.

Local historians have produced a first-rate history of your community, but your communitys not big enough to attract a traditional publisher, given that the history might only attract 20, 30, or 300 readers. Your library can help.

Your academic library serves as the sponsoring agency for one or more open access scholarly journals using Open Journal Systems or other open source software and publishing articles on the web as PDFs, perhaps totaling two dozen papers and 400 pages for a journals annual volume. You believe a handful of libraries and a handful of authors would love to have proper print volumes of the journal, but theres no way to justify a big print run. Your library can help.

You can probably think of hundreds of other examples, cases where there are stories to be told within your communities, stories worth preserving that wont attract a big publisher and that dont justify spending thousands of dollars for a big press run. Chances are, at least one out of five of your community members has a potential book in themand at least a quarter of those potential books would be worth having for some number of readers. Your library can help.

Consider an extreme case. Someone in your community wants to gather some family stories or put together some adviceand only wants one copy, a single hardback volume to be handed down to the next generation. Your library can help.

Or another extreme: A person or group in your community is an expert in a narrow field, one so narrow that his or her expertise might only be useful for two dozen others in the worldbut it might turn out to be attractive to two thousand or more. Your library can help.

And it wont cost your library a dimeother than this book, possibly in multiple copies. Your library can enhance your community and increase the librarys role in that community by helping patrons and groups of patrons tell their stories using free and low-cost tools.

Stories come in all lengths and flavors and include fiction and nonfiction. We use stories to share wisdom and ideas as well as experiences. Everybody in your community has stories to share; many people in every community have stories that others can benefit from.

Everybody has knowledge others can learn from, and lifelong learning is one of the primary missions of public libraries. Some of that knowledge is and remains local; some begins at a local level and should be shared more broadly.

People also love to share experiencesliving vicariously but also gaining background for future adventures. Your library may already host travel presentations by community members. Cumulated experiences make great books, and micropublishing can make those books real. They can also serve our natural tendency to be interested in ourselves and those around us; local experience carries special flavor. Micropublishing strengthens a community by sharing its stories.