Tonight was the second of three publishing seminars put on by the University. This evenings speaker was Matt Kibble from Bloomsbury, previously of ProQuest, who came to talk about working in the fabulous world of digital publishing.
He took us through his various job titles over the past 12 years and what his roles actually involved as well as explaining what goes into a company who provide digital content for the academic library market (JSTOR for example).
He explained how his role was a mix of market research, rights negotiations, project management and presenting financial business plans. He basically does a bit of everything as he sees the projects through from start to finish. For example he was telling us how he was involved in creating a digital archive of Vogue for academic library use and how he had been involved in every step from getting initial permissions to organising the launch of the final product.
And you don't have to be particularly techy to get into this kind of work. As long as you know what other people are doing and can talk about it you don't actually have to do any of the techy stuff yourself, as Matt proved by explaining his background as an academic.
The main thing I took away from this talk is how un-established this sector of publishing is. Matt talked about the problems in terminology and definitions within his work because it is a hybrid market that is not quite publishing and not quite product management but a mash up of the two. So all the roles within this industry haven't been defined yet and are constantly developing and people are having to adapt - something perhaps shown most when Matt could not answer a question about what qualities people looking to go into the industry require. He didn't know because nothing has been established long enough to become the rule yet.
So yes very interesting to learn about all the hybrid
He took us through his various job titles over the past 12 years and what his roles actually involved as well as explaining what goes into a company who provide digital content for the academic library market (JSTOR for example).
He explained how his role was a mix of market research, rights negotiations, project management and presenting financial business plans. He basically does a bit of everything as he sees the projects through from start to finish. For example he was telling us how he was involved in creating a digital archive of Vogue for academic library use and how he had been involved in every step from getting initial permissions to organising the launch of the final product.
And you don't have to be particularly techy to get into this kind of work. As long as you know what other people are doing and can talk about it you don't actually have to do any of the techy stuff yourself, as Matt proved by explaining his background as an academic.
The main thing I took away from this talk is how un-established this sector of publishing is. Matt talked about the problems in terminology and definitions within his work because it is a hybrid market that is not quite publishing and not quite product management but a mash up of the two. So all the roles within this industry haven't been defined yet and are constantly developing and people are having to adapt - something perhaps shown most when Matt could not answer a question about what qualities people looking to go into the industry require. He didn't know because nothing has been established long enough to become the rule yet.
So yes very interesting to learn about all the hybrid
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