Against the Grain V34#6

Genevieve Croteau

Chief Operating Officer
Coherent Digital, LLC
Kensington, Maryland
Phone:  (860) 304-1762
https://coherentdigital.net/teams

Born and lived:  New Hampshire, Arizona, Connecticut, Montreal, New York City, Florida, Washington, DC.

Early life:  It was the ’80s.  I watched way too much MTV against my parents’ wishes. 

Professional career and activities:  I have always been involved in helping small, creative companies grow, first in media and now in the information industry.  Over the last 20 years, I’ve held creative roles developing new products, sales, marketing, HR, and operations.  The challenge for me now is linking these parts into a coherent whole and helping to build a company that’s beloved by both customers and the team.  I believe relationships are at the heart of every business.  I care a great deal about workplace culture, equity, and good decision-making. 

Family:  Shout out to my 10-year-old daughter Pearl and 5-year-old son Grant.

Favorite books:  Always reading something self-improvement, whether business or personal. 

Pet peeves:  Snobiness.

Philosophy:  I keep a wall of quotes in my office.  The most recent addition is: “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”

Most memorable career achievement:  Signing on with Coherent Digital, my first true start-up. 

How/where do I see the industry in five years:  I believe librarians will make great gains in diversifying and decolonizing knowledge over the next five years.  Companies who can contribute and make this living, sustainable, and ongoing work will be the most successful. 

Toby Green

Co-Founder
Coherent Digital
2 Impasse de L’Eglise,
Marquemont Haut,
Monneville 60240, France
Phone:  +33 6 07 76 80 86
https://coherentdigital.net/

Born and lived:  Born in Broadwindsor, Dorset, UK. Lived in London, Oxford and Paris.

Early life:  Educated at Marlborough College and then read microbiology and virology at University of Warwick.

Professional career and activities:  Started out in 1983 promoting books at Academic Press, London before learning about journals at Applied Science Publishers.  In 1987, joined Pergamon Press where I learned about major reference works, A&I services and CD-Roms and then, after Elsevier Science acquired Pergamon, newsletters and magazines.  Moved to France in 1998 to join OECD Publshing where I learned to wrestle with datasets and publishing reports and led OECD to a digital-first operation, closing the print-shop in the process.  In 2019, left OECD to co-found Coherent Digital.  Was active with ALPSP, including as Chair, and member of RSC’s publishing board.

Family:  Married with three almost grown-up offspring.

In my spare time:  Cook, garden and play disc golf.

Favorite books:  Gulliver’s Travels.  (First book I ever liked and read cover-to-cover).

Pet peeves:  Thoughtless bureaucracy.

Philosophy:  It’ll all come right in the end.

Most memorable career achievement:  Winning Academic and Professional Publisher of the Year at London Book Fair.

Goal I hope to achieve five years from now:  To see Coherent Digital thriving.

How/where do I see the industry in five years:  Probably still bogged down with trying to make open access journals affordable and sustainable (when all the interesting action is elsewhere).

Jessica Lawrence-Hurt

Chief Marketing Officer
Cadmore Media
4800 Hampden Road, Suite 200
Bethesda, MD  20814
Phone:  (202) 281-0257
https://cadmore.media/

Born and lived:  Grew up in New Hampshire;  college north of Boston, ten years in DC, and now back in Boston area.

Early life:  I’m the oldest child in a large family and have often been told I give “big sister energy”!  I had a very bohemian childhood;  homeschooled, playing in the woods, writing plays and energetically “directing” my younger brothers.  Books were a huge part of my life then and now:  weekly trips to the library where I used my mom’s library card to check out as many books as I wanted.  The children’s card only allowed for a measly two books at a time, which would not have gotten me to the next day, never mind the next week.  My first “real” job was as a library page, where I was supposed to shelve books but really spent a lot of time reading…..

Professional career and activities:  I’ve been in scholarly publishing my whole career and have been fortunate to have roles in all sorts of environments, from journals, books, and digital resources to now working for a tech platform.  I went back and forth between acquisitions and marketing for a while before finally settling where I belong:  on the sales and marketing front.  Along the way I’ve been involved in SSP, AUP, Boston Women in Information, and various mentorship programs.  This year I’m co-charing the Community Engagement Committee for SSP.

In my spare time:  Reading of course!  Roughly split between nonfiction and fiction;  I especially like travel, memoir, and essays, and staying on top of the latest releases in literary fiction.  I also travel as much as possible. 

Pet peeves:  Rudeness, especially to those in a service position.  I think anyone who’s ever waited tables knows what I mean! 

Philosophy:  “Happiness is when what you think, what you do, and what you say are in harmony,” Gandi.

How/where do I see the industry in five years:  Things tend to move slowly and then all at once in scholarly communications.  I anticipate five years from now we’ll still be wrestling with the implications of OA, but by and large the infrastructure will be in place for the majority of content.  Streaming media will be a part of most publisher portfolios, in some capacity.  The industry as a whole will have banded together to make serious inroads in teaching information literacy and research skills.

Curtis Michelson

CEO, infoDJ
www.infodj.io

Born and lived:  Miami, FL;  Managua Nicaragua;  and Orlando, FL.

Early life:  Grew up in Miami, FL, graduated with BA in Philosophy.  Lived in Managua in 1991 and experienced a poltical radicalization that led me to become a full-time community organizer for Florida PIRG.  Became a software developer and hacker in my 30s.  Entrepreneur and consultant in my 40s and the father of one beautiful boy.  Today, in my 50’s, I’m a full-time ecosystem organizer and outspoken gadfly advocating for human-centered organizations and radical rethinks of standard business approaches.  And, now in my 50s, a happy gardener and grower of luscious fruits and vegetables.

Pet peeves:  Pharma ads on American broadcast news

How/where do I see the industry in five years:  How can I not say a move to more open web resources?  😉  I’ll also stake my claim on a future world where sense-making services (librarianship) are increasingly more needed and valued, and large aggregate content collections stabilize in price or get cheaper.  Add-on services, most all of them AI-powered or augmented, will allow us to finally integrate civil, govt, academic and citizen neworks into a whole trustworthy ecosystem of solid knowledge and shared understanding.

Andrea Eastman-Mullins

Founder / CEO
West End Learning
500 West 5th Street, 4th Floor
Winston-Salem, NC  27101
Phone:  (336) 448-3327
https://www.westendlearning.com/

Born and lived:  Born in Fairborn, Ohio.  Lived in Ohio, Florida (a few times), New York, Virginia, Michigan, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, now home. 

Early life:  Aspiring poet, philosopher, and world traveler living small town life in rural Ohio. 

Professional career and activities:  A degree in philosophy led to my first jobs in editorial roles at SIRS Publishing and Chadwyck-Healey.  Since then, my career spans more than 25 years covering all aspects of aggregated collections for teaching and research.  In executive and product management roles for ProQuest, Alexander Street Press, Chadwyck-Healey, and SIRS, I led teams to develop over 300 library databases including the first streaming video and audio collections for academic libraries.  Most recently, I launched West End Learning, a business supporting the adoption of OER and affordable learning resources.

I have always had an interest in learning and technology.  With a Master’s in Higher Education Administration with a focus on Instructional Design from the University of Michigan, I researched the peer review process of MERLOT.org, one of the first aggregations of digital learning objects.  At the University of North Carolina’s Teaching and Learning with Technology Collaborative, I led faculty development initiatives statewide.

I have been a speaker at the Charleston Conference, ER&L, UKSG, MLA, and Educause and have published on OER and affordable learning.

Family:  I live with my husband of nearly 25-years, Rob Eastman-Mullins, a scenography professor at Wake Forest University, son, Ian, daughter, Dana, and pandemic puppy, Gobo. 

In my spare time:  When not planning our next trip, I throw things — bowling balls and pottery (not together).  

Philosophy:  Yes, my favorite subject.

Most memorable career achievement:  Leaving a stable job to bet on myself and found West End Learning. 

Goal I hope to achieve five years from now:  Make a significant contribution to the future of education. 

How/where do I see the industry in five years:  Teaching and learning will become a key priority for academic libraries as they align their work with the university’s focus on student success.  Yet teaching and learning will evolve tremendously over the next 5-20 years.  It will be considerably messy as libraries shift their focus to support a moving target.  Thousands of e-learning platforms, new business models, and publishing programs will emerge and divert resource from journals and books.  My bet is the ones that are faculty-led have the potential to be most effective and innovative.

Gary Price

Librarian, Researcher, Speaker
Co-Founder: infoDJ
Co-Founder, Editor: infoDOCKET
Editor: ARL Day in Review
416 E. Franklin Avenue
Silver Spring, MD  20901
Phone:  (301) 538–33709
http://infodj.io
http://infodocket.com
https://www.arl.org/category/day-in-review/

Born and lived:  Born in Chicago, IL.  Lived in Lawrence, KS, Detroit, MI, and Silver Spring, MD.

Early life:  Raised in Chicago’s Northern Suburbs not far from Northwestern University.  Undergraduate Degree, Film Studies, University of Kansas.  Masters of Library and Information Science, Wayne St. University.

Professional career and activities:  Winner of Three Awards From Special Libraries Association.

Family:  Husband, Father, Brother, Uncle.

In my spare time:  Listening to Music, Learning About Musicians, Genres, Recording Studios, etc.  Learning About Commercial Aviation and Other Forms of Transportation.  Movies.  Learning About and Discovering Maps, Databases, and Other Research Tools (Print and Digital).  Visiting Libraries.

Favorite books:  Siddartha by Hermann Hesse.  In the past few years, The Box by Marc Levinson.

Most memorable career achievement:  I have several but one of them was speaking about digital privacy in the Gaillard Center at the Charleston Conference. 

How/where do I see the industry in five years:  My hope is that the industry will be doing a better job explaining and demonstrating the value of what we offer to a wide variety of current users as well as  potential users.  At the same time my hope is that the skills and abilities that information professionals offer are  better understood by the public.  If we don’t explain, who will?

Stephen Rhind-Tutt

President, Coherent Digital, LLC
Alexandria, VA  22314
https://coherentdigital.net

Born and lived:  Windsor, UK; Hamburg, Germany; Brussels, Belgium; Jever, Germany; London, UK; Boston, MA; San Francisco, CA; and now Washington DC.

Early life:  Went to a British boarding school, spent blissful vacations with my family in Europe.  Went to college at University College London, then MBA at Boston University.

Professional career and activities:  I began as a sales rep for a consumer foods company, then joined a fledgling CD-ROM publisher in the late 1980s.  Since then I’ve worked for a wide range of companies in the information industry including SilverPlatter, Gale, ProQuest, and Chadwyck-Healey.  I’ve sat on several boards including the University of California Press and the Council on Library and Information Resources.  I co-founded Alexander Street Press in 2000.  In 2018 I co-founded Coherent Digital with colleagues and friends Toby Green, Eileen Lawrence and others.

Family:  Married to Janice for 20+ years, 3 kids – Michael (19), David (16), Serafina (13).  Lots of relatives in the UK including cousin Julian who now dominates every search on Google for the name Rhind-Tutt.  

In my spare time:  Movies, books, travel.  Tried sailing, flying and golf, but somehow never found joy in them.

Favorite movies:  Ipcress File, Bridge on the River Kwai, Anchorman, Italian Job, Le Clan Sicilien, Das Boot, Witness, Ordinary People, Aliens, Ground Hog Day – I can just keep going on this, but I’ll stop here.

Pet peeves:  I’d like the President to create an executive order that fines those who deliberately jump lines in traffic $1,000 automatically by camera.

Philosophy:  Do it with all thy might.

Most memorable career achievement:  Yet to come!

Goal I hope to achieve five years from now:  To have really made progress in “taming wild content!”

How/where do I see the industry in five years:  There will be much more content, in many more formats.  It will be ever more aggregated and atomized.  It will appear on ever more screens which will get larger and smaller.  It will get more current and go back further.  Machine tools and AI will enrich it more and more, and make it much easier to process programmatically.  It will be more open and more closed.  I’d love to say that the hegemony of journals over all other forms of content will be broken, but I don’t see that happening within five years.

COMPANY PROFILES ENCOURAGED

Cadmore Media

4800 Hampden Lane, Suite 200
Bethesda, MD  20814  USA
Fernhill, Churchlane, Drayton
Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4JS  UK
https://cadmore.media/

Key products and services:  Products and services to embed video and audio content on any website or to create a branded site.  Configurable streaming media players for video and audio content;  a streaming media platform for content management; a media library product; and embedded live events. 

Core markets/clientele:  Scholarly societies, associations, and publishers. 

Number of employees:  17

History and brief description of your company/publishing program:  Cadmore Media was founded in 2018 by scholarly and video publishing veterans who saw a need to make video publishing an accessible proposition for a wide range of academic and professional use cases.  Essentially, we want to transform the creation and dissemination of video and audio content in the scholarly world through expert technology, robust partnerships, and best-in-class service.

To do this, we hire great people, build client-driven products, and facilitate industry-wide innovation.  We were awarded the Digital Science Catalyst Grant in 2018 and the NFAIS Digital Startup Challenge in 2019.  Today, we employ 17 people across the US and UK, serve leading academic and professional associations and societies, and are making strides toward bringing video into the wider publishing ecosystem.

Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers?  You can subscribe to our newsletter for timely articles about the current status of video in scholarly communication here: https://cadmore.media/contact.  Check out the Resources section of our website for curated reports, articles, and presentations on streaming media, accessibility, and virtual events:  https://cadmore.media/resources.

Coherent Digital, LLC

623 South Fairfax Street
Alexandria, VA  22314
https://coherentdigital.net

Officers:  Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President; Toby Green, Managing Director; Genevieve Croteau, COO.

Key products and services:  Policy Commons, Mindscape Commons, Africa Commons, Canada Commons, History Commons, Sabinet Complete, South Asia Archive.

Each Commons is an authoritative and comprehensive source of critical research and learning materials within a discipline.  It includes content that’s uncatalogued, undiscoverable, uncitable, prone to link rot, and likely to disappear.  Where content is in danger of being lost forever, we make sure that it’s stabilized, findable, and preserved.

Core markets/clientele:  Researchers, faculty and students in universities, colleges, governments, corporations, and think-tanks.

Number of employees:  15

Number of books published annually (print, electronic, open access, etc.):  We’ve licensed and published over 2,000 books, hundreds of videos, VR experiences, reports, magazines and other research and learning materials.

We publish approximately 6m pages of archival materials, licensed from leading archives such as the UK’s National Archives.

We’ve captured, indexed, enriched and preserved over 3.5m reports from think tanks, NGOs and IGOs.  In 2021 we added over 2m new items.

We’ve captured, indexed, enriched and preserved over 300,000 primary sources from over 600 different institutions.

History and brief description of your company/publishing program:  Coherent’s mission is to “tame wild content.”  We do this by developing “Commons” in specific disciplines.  

Each Commons uses machine indexing, AI, and manual techniques to catalog and enrich content at speed and at low cost.  Faculty can upload links or content, which become searchable and available within minutes.  Over time, we enrich the content and build usage with new features, new links, and more context.

Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers?  We were founded towards the end of 2019, just before the pandemic began.  We’re 100% virtual with employees in 8 countries and 4 continents.  The founders of Alexander Street co-founded Coherent Digital, and many of our staff are ex-Alexander Street.

infoDJ

1024 Garden Plaza
Orlando, FL  32803
Phone:  (407) 319-8559
https://www.infodj.io

Key products and services:  Research scans for innovation teams + customized newsletters.

Core markets/clientele:  Enterprise change and transformation teams.

Number of employees:  5

History and brief description of your company/publishing program:  infDJ began as an experiment.  What might happen if library skills were leveraged on innovation initiatives.  We discovered good things happen as teams pushing into unknown terrains get a psychological boost from an external librarian feeding them germane insights about their domain. 

Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers?  We believe the future specialty librarian is an AI.  And, it is also a living breathing information science professional who engages with their management and leadership teams to help them make the most use of the AI, to develop fresh insights and growth narratives.

West End Learning

500 West 5th Street, Floor 4
Winston-Salem, NC  27101
Phone:  (336) 448-3327
https://www.westendlearning.com/

Officers:  Andrea Eastman-Mullins, CEO.

Key products and services:  Product – Syllect, a platform that matches syllabi and course objectives to a vetted library of Open Educational Resources (OER), saving faculty time in course planning.  Now available covering entrepreneurship and innovation. 

Services – We apply our expertise in publishing, instructional design, and leadership to provide custom support for e-learning projects and OER initiatives. 

Core markets/clientele:  Faculty, colleges, associations, and organizations with a mission to educate.

Number of employees:  4 and growing.

History and brief description of your company/publishing program:  Andrea Eastman-Mullins founded West End Learning after a career working with libraries at ProQuest and Alexander Street Press and faculty at the University of North Carolina.  She was struck by how valuable the library’s resources were for teaching but how few faculty found them during course planning.  Some of the most affordable and highest-quality learning materials are missed, leaving students with expensive curriculum and content creators with limited impact. 

West End Learning provides support in two ways:  1) Custom services for faculty, associations, and learning organizations to develop e-learning projects and increase their impact.  2) Syllect, a platform for faculty, aligns affordable learning materials to course objectives to make it easier to teach with affordable course materials that engage and inspire. We focus on materials that bring diverse perspectives, critical thinking, and active learning to the classroom starting in entrepreneurship. 

Is there anything else that you think would be of interest to our readers?  West End Learning’s name is inspired in part by London’s theatre district.  Effective theatre is truly a collaborative art–involving performers, playwrights, directors, designers, builders, and an interactive audience.  We believe the future of teaching is the same–engaging faculty, instructional designers, libraries, content authors, and of course students in new ways of learning.