From: Tony Sanfilippo <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:15:35 -0400

Hi Rick, I think you are also kind of distorting my point.

Okay—never respond to a liblicense post on an iPhone after discovering
you've missed your connecting flight home, have to rent a car, and
have a 4 hour drive ahead of you and it's midnight—Lesson learned. But
you took the response apart and pretended it wasn't about revised
dissertations. Yeah, I objected to being asked to do something that
someone getting a cut of the sale used to do—not unlike how the
savings on bagging our own groceries benefits the grocery store, not
really the consumer or the producer. But that's not the same as
objecting to describing conference proceedings when the book is based
on conference proceedings, which I'm pretty sure I didn't do, and do
do in the copy I provide YBP. I specifically said I had no problem
with most of that list. I also initially posted the list in response
to your post that libraries don't really exclude dissertations. Yes,
they do, and I assume its placement at the top of that list isn't
arbitrary  I'm sorry that I referred to dissertations as previous work
and caused this confusion, but my objection remains to asking
publishers to include an indication about whether a book is based on
the author's graduate work. It seems similar to asking their age when
writing the book, and then choosing books based on that age.

It is also worth noting that the list B&T/YBP provided very artfully
handles the dissertation thing. While this was presented as
information we should provide with our metadata, the listing also
notes only what happens if provenance is revealed in marketing copy or
frontmatter. The description doesn't actually note which ONIX field
"dissertation" should appear in. Is there something to be learned from
that?

And the ingredients thing? Yeah, I mixed a metaphor and started this,
but "ingredients" doesn't apply here. It seems much more like asking
the farmer about the product being organic, before we had a standard
for organic. (And do we even now have a reliable standard for
organic?) It's not that I don't want to provide the information, it's
that I don't think the question has a useful answer. A book being
based on graduate work is about as relevant to the quality of the work
as the age of the author. All scholarship is, by nature, based on
previous work. I am more likely to give you an answer to the question
about the provenance of the work if you can give me more than just
Yes, dissertation or No as options. That was my point.

Thanks,
Tony


On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 9:41 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 03:23:35 +0000
>
> >Your analogy breaks down, Rick, because the book that originated as a
> >dissertation does not really list its "ingredients" anywhere.  There
> >is no explanation to be found in any such book as to exactly what
> >revisions were made to turn the dissertation into a book.
>
> You're distorting my analogy, Sandy. No one is asking publishers to
> provide a list of revisions made to their dissertation-based books. What
> YBP is asking Tony's press to do is provide some very basic information
> about their books -- are they conference monographs, are they reprints,
> are they revised dissertations, etc. Tony is objecting on the basis that
> providing such information will tend to drive down sales.
>
> Am I really the only one to whom this response seems patently perverse?
> Tony is making it seem as though the more people know about PSUP's
> books, the less likely they are to buy them.
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Interim Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library
> University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]