About the Wiki, By SLIS Student Alison Peters

Career Blog Jill-Klees

Do you want to increase your online presence and get yourself noticed as a way to support your job search efforts but have no idea where to get started writing for publication? There’s a wiki for that. If you have exciting research, tips, a personal success story, LIS trends, technologies, successful programs you’ve used in your SLIS internship —the LIS Publications Wiki, developed by SLIS students for LIS students, gives you the tools you need to publish.

Search the database to discover publications and websites catering to your area of interest. Browse through hundreds of titles to get new ideas and new communities to join. And then click on any one to learn exactly what the publication is looking for, who it’s catered to, and how and where to submit a query. The wiki currently contains information on journal and magazine publications, but soon will host LIS book publishing details as well.

As part of a Libr 298 Independent Study project, SLIS student Adrienne Mathewson and I reached out to all sorts of editors—LIS scholarly publications, professional and trade publications, civilian publications and LIS specific online forum communities—and worked with them to update their publication’s information, including submission guidelines, what they’re looking for in content, and current readership statistics. Working on the wiki has given me invaluable insight into what publications are seeking from contributing writers, as well as a peek into the editorial process. We found these editors to be a wonderful group of people, eager to hear from—and work with—LIS students. Adrienne’s work on the wiki propelled her to apply for the Editor-in-Chief role on the Student Research Journal (SRJ), where she continues to use the wiki to research other scholarly journals and keep up with published materials and new ways of access.

Adrienne notes that, “The wiki’s purpose and function are easy to understand. The way the categories are separated really adds to its usefulness, since a user can tell right away if the resource is a scholarly journal, magazine, website, etc. Also, the descriptions are clear enough so that a person who is looking for places to publish can weed out the sites without actually having to visit each website and search for relevant information such as author guidelines.”

Adrienne continues to add to and consult the wiki on a professional and personal basis. “My next project with the wiki,” she confirms, “Will be identifying and labeling the open access journals so that they’re easily visible to the user.”

And as for me, the experience working on the wiki, as well as the excellent information I gathered on the process of writing for publication, inspired me to query publications such as Collaborative Librarianship and Hack Library School, where I submitted articles detailing the wiki for their readers. And I was able to incorporate my love of books and writing through civilian publication BookRiot, where I’m now a contributing writer. All thanks to one little wiki.

Have an idea that you’d like to share with the LIS community? Start with the LIS Publications Wiki. The sky’s the limit.

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