MapRecord Publications invites you to consider authoring a bibliography.
In 2011 we published Don McGuirk's cartobibliography The Last Great Cartographic Myth: Mer de l'Ouest, which documented the appearance of a fictional "Sea of the West" on many maps published in the eighteenth century. We are eager to help others to produce bibliographies in a similar way, documenting a focused collection in any area (not at all limited to maps), thereby making your collection and your research available to a wider audience.
The heart of a MapRecord bibliography is the list of items in a collection that has been documented using Recollector. Building a description of a collection using Recollector can be thought of as the private side of documenting your collection. When you reach the point where you want to make this information public, MapRecord Publications provides the means to do this simply, effectively and inexpensively.
The best way to get a sense of what a bibliography published by MapRecord Publications looks like is to examine the Mer de l'Ouest page on our web site. You can see there that the heart of the bibliography is the detailed information - in the form of a bibliographic list - that derives directly from your collection database. But this bibliographic core can be supplemented by additional chapters (which can include both text and imagery), as well as a Table of Contents that gives the reader simple access to the chapters and to the central bibliographic list.
As the publisher, MapRecord Publications will work with you to take your collection database (including imagery), along with any desired text chapters, and produce the final product. The bibliography is packaged on a USB flash drive, with custom "covers" (front and back imagery and text). MapRecord Publications provides the web-based description of your work as well as the sales channel, so buyers can read about the bibliography and order it easily online. We also provide an online update service, so you can periodically update your bibliography and make those updates available to all those who have purchased your work.
This description may sound like we are supporting a form of "self-publishing," and to some extent this is true, in that it is primarily the author, and not the publisher, who decides to publish the work. (We do, of course, reserve the right to decide whether to publish any particular work.) But unlike most companies that support self-publishing, MapRecord Publications does not charge you for the opportunity to publish. The only up-front cost to the author is the purchase price of the blank USB flash drives (typically about $10 per copy for an attractive format with art work on the covers, but can be considerably less for plainer styles). Profits on the sale of individual copies are shared between the author and the publisher.
If you would like to explore the possibility of publishing a USB flash-drive bibliography with MapRecord Publications, please contact the publisher. Click here for contact information.