| Tip O’Neill, former speaker of the House, said, “All politics is local.” Gloria Steinem, in the early years of the feminist movement, said, “The political is personal.” And so, the origins of this book are both local and personal. After watching the circuitous route a locally produced database took on its way to becoming Web-accessible, and being tangentially involved in the early planning stages of this move, I looked around to see what printed resources on this subject were available for libraries, museums, and other nonprofits. The answer was “not much if anything.”
Thus, this book was born, or at least inspired. The road to actual publication has been unpaved and more than a bit bumpy, but it’s now complete. Edited works, as opposed to those authored by one person, are sometimes considered uneven, in part because a variety of voices tell the story. Yet, this is comparable to the difference between a group discussion and a lecture. It may be easier to take notes in a lecture, but a group discussion stirs up a lot more thought and is usually a lot more fun. The differing voices, overlapping sentences, and varying speech patterns and metaphors make the process livelier. In my instructions to chapter authors, I asked them to write casually, as if having lunch with a friend who asked how they did what they did or what they thought about the topic of their chapter. Other than that, they were left mostly to their own devices. |