Yes, the interviews are back

Way back when, I used to post fairly frequent interviews with publishers, bloggers, librarians and scientists who I thought were interesting people to hear from. Mostly I wanted to hear about what they thought about changes in the scholarly publishing environment.

I've got links to a bunch of them below, mostly to the old blog. (I'll start moving the rest over here when I'm done with the book reviews.)

The last significant interview I did was with Dorothea Salo, way back in October 2008.

What happened?

Well, I decided I wanted my next interview to be with someone involved with publishing at a scholarly society. I actually identified a couple of candidates who looked like they might have some really interesting things to say. For whatever reason, I just ended up getting radio silence when I tried to contact them or get their agreement to be interviewed.

In the end, it was such a frustrating experience that I just gave up. Probably unwisely, but I guess there's never a shortage of things to blog about, only a shortage of time to actually devote to blogging. Especially once I moved here to ScienceBlogs, I guess lower-hanging blogging fruit became more of a priority.

The only interviews I've posted since October 2008 were a couple of relatively short ones with CISTI and a sort-of interview with Kevin Marvel of the American Astronomical Society. While those were good, solid interviews, they weren't quite what I was hoping for.

In any case, two things.

One: Coming a few minutes after this post is a group interview with the gang at EngineerBlogs.org.

Two: I'm going to try and start doing these more regularly, perhaps back to around two per school term. Here's where I need your help. I'd like to make my next interview subject someone in the scholarly society world again, to answer similar question to the ones Kevin Marvel did. Please volunteer at jdupuis at yorku dot ca if you're that person. Or if you know of someone who might be willing, please let me know.

I'll update here when the interview post is actually published.

As promised, some of the older set of interviews:

• Timo Hannay of Nature
• Michael Morgan of Morgan & Claypool
• Jane of See Jane Compute
• Christopher Leonard of PhysMathCentral
• Dorothea Salo of Book of Trogool
• Bora Zivkovic of A Blog Around the Clock.
• Sasha Gurke of Knovel
• Richard Akerman of CISTI