This is part 11 of the Travels with Terence series, following our digital projects editor on his pilot press in-person training program.

Last week Terence was in Montreal, Quebec, meeting with the three-person staff of Concordia University Press, which was established in 2016 and will this fall publish its first books.

“It's exciting for a new scholarly publisher like Concordia University Press to be a part of this pilot,” noted interim director Geoffrey Little. “We look forward to learning how Manifold can help us publish our peer-reviewed open-access books.”

Despite priding himself as being directionally adept, Terence found himself a bit misplaced when he made his way to the Webster Library—home of the press—for the first sessions of the trip. “I was a bit early, and as I was making my way around a woman who had walked past me just a moment prior called out my name. It was Meredith Carruthers, the press’s Editorial and Production Coordinator; she recognized me from my email avatar. That was definitely a first, especially given how bad I am at making avatars of myself.”

After introductions and a brief tour, Terence led Meredith and the press’s intern Charles on a guided tour of the platform, beginning with its origins and aims, demoing its present capabilities, and concluding with a review of the roadmap for future development. “I always love doing this opening session because it really reveals what the system is and serves as a catalyst for so many of the discussions that come in the later sessions.”

Geoffrey caught up with Meredith and Terence for lunch, where they had the chance to talk about their backgrounds and what brought them to publishing before they pivoted back to the library for a couple of sessions considering workflow and discovery and presentation. Terence remarked:

As a brand new press with a small staff, Concordia is in such an exciting space where they aren’t beholden to past norms and can instead chart their course fresh from scratch. There’s so much involved in building up a publishing house, but it’s also so very invigorating to be at the start of something. We bonded a bit over that a bit. With Manifold only its fourth year, we can very much relate.

The next day Terence ran a session demoing the platform for interested parties from throughout the university, especially from within the library, as well as from the local publishing community, including Jonathan Crago from McGill-Queen’s University Press. After a quick break the team was back at it with lead developer, Zach Davis, leading a session about the underlying architecture of Manifold remotely from Cast Iron’s offices in Portland, Oregon.

Terence and the Concordia group came away with a strong basis for considering their own forward steps. "We covered a lot of great ground in that meeting, and we were able to really hash through some interesting questions of how to represent material arts, which will be a focus of the press’s work, in a digital landscape like Manifold. I feel like we walked away from that meeting with a host of ideas for possible new features that would speak to those concerns."

As a sort of punctuation mark to that meeting, Meredith and Terence took a long lunch at the nearby Canadian Centre for Architecture to attend a talk by architect Konstantinos Pantazis, co-founder of Point Supreme Architects based in Athens. Konstantinos's presentation was an informal reflection on ten influential books in his career and process. Terence commented:

Being in that beautiful museum and listening to a nuanced conversation about the artistry of physical and functional objects was all the more striking having been talking about a platform that exists in an ethereal space. It was a striking counterpoint to the day. It certainly helped recenter us for the final session, a three-hour-long deep dive into the use Manifold. And then all of a sudden we were done. And the first round of pilot visits were over. It seems like we just started!

Closing out the trip, Terence commented on Slack to the group in private, “This was a blast! I’m ready to line up round 2 already!” Soon, Terence. Soon...

Learn more about the Concordia University Press and follow them on Twitter.

• Miles Travelled: 1,894
• Travels with Terence Nostalgia: "I’m nostalgic about it all. Every trip was different and all were filled with such great people. I couldn’t be luckier!"
• Dining Notes: At long last, ramen! It was worth the wait!

Thanks for reading! Feel free to reach out on the community Slack channel, tweet us at @manifoldscholar, and follow along with development on Github.