Why “Crossroads”? If I ever started a publishing company, I would call it Meeting Street Publishing. It refers to the collaboration that is behind most publishing projects, and it reminds me of many years attending the wonderful Charleston Conference, where librarians and publishers have equal billing. (Of course many towns have Meeting Streets, but Charleston’s is well known.) “Meeting Street” as a metaphor is related to “Crossroads,” which is a reminder that scholars, publishers, librarians, and technologists will together determine the direction that scholarly publishing will take in the future. Sometimes we think of publishing as a sort of weather pattern in the sky over which we have no control, but I am interested in how we shape the future through our choices. “Meeting Street” is about communication and collaboration, while “Crossroads” adds to that the image of roads to be taken and not taken.
Some people say that publishing is changing rapidly, but in my experience over the last few decades (yikes, a long time!), this change is astonishingly slow. The pace definitely gives us time to reflect on what we are doing (or not doing).
The term “Crossroads” is also related to Publishing Makerspace, a working group that I co-founded in 2014. It is dedicated to encouraging collaboration, supporting multi-modal publishing, and ultimately redefining scholarly publishing to include all the forms of work that scholars are creating today.
I like the idea of liminality–a boundary that is not a line but rather a creative space where categories overlap and recombine. Whether I am planning an encyclopedia project that will define a field for a generation or sewing a pamphlet to please a friend, I appreciate the sense of “serious fun” and creative possibility inherent in publishing and want to share it.
Update 2022: I am still on Twitter @SylviaKMiller but also now on Mastodon @SylviaKMiller@hcommons.social. See you there!