Terence Smyre, University of Minnesota Press’s Digital Projects Editor, is about to hit the road for Manifold Scholarship Digital Services Pilot Trainings. That’s a lot of titles to say that he’s about to work with the ten publishers (announced this summer) just starting off with Manifold. Terence came to Manifold and Minnesota after many years and many roles at the University of Nebraska Press, and he is ready to help integrate Manifold production into each publisher’s workflow.

To kick off his exciting adventures, we thought we’d feature an interview to give those following an idea of what he sees coming, how in-person trainings fit within digital domains, and which American Ninja Warrior challenges he anticipates. Terence has famously claimed to love airports—we will see if that’s still true when he returns from the ten training trips.

First question: Because you’re someone who’s worked a lot building projects on Manifold, to get our interview started could you tell readers—what’s your favorite thing about Manifold?

I like that we’re providing a platform for people who wouldn’t otherwise have one or would have to rely on a separate vendor. Zach and his team at Cast Iron have done a lot of work to make sure that Manifold is easy to use, and I think that’s crucial. I’m a big fan of bringing as much work in-house as you can and building up your own experience and knowledge base. With Manifold, publishers will have the ability to serve their materials on the web in an elegant way and make use of all the various forms of media the digital environment allows.

I’m curious about your experience before Manifold? Can you tell us something about your time at Nebraska?

I was at Nebraska for twelve-ish years, and I was in both the books and journals programs, but I primarily oversaw journals production. That involved working with journal editors and authors, evaluating manuscripts for structure, style, mechanics, and copyright concerns, coding manuscripts to our production system, preparing notes and directions for our freelance copy editors and our in-house typesetter, evaluating edits and proofs and corrections to them, and then working out print runs, etc. And I did some general business/budgetary stuff for those parts of the process I worked with. It was a lot, but it was a great team. I oversaw a typesetter dedicated to journals work and a project supervisor who I was glad to see take over for me when I left.

So full cycle?

Full cycle. I think when I was there we had thirty journals. Also, just before I left, we began working with Nebraska’s extension program and helping them with their publications. The extension publications are a really good use case for Manifold—often shorter documents, reports, created by experts in the field with outreach programs, all the way up to larger spiral bound publications.

Your text-preparation experience at Nebraska was pretty soup to nuts?

Yeah. It was fun. I was also part of a small team that helped implement Scribe’s Well-Formed Document Workflow for the press, changing over from a do-it-yourself coding system to a more regimented, structured XML workflow.

So you were ready. You knew Manifold was the thing we needed.

It’s funny, I remember in April 2015 when the press release went out about Manifold, I thought “this is what we should be doing—we should be doing this” and that if any position opened up, I was going to throw my hat in. Because there’s no way I couldn’t. When I saw the advertisement later that summer I was excited, but I also didn’t expect to get a call, because I was sure everyone and their brother would be banging down the door for the opportunity. It’s just too awesome.

It’s worked out great for all of us.

I feel very lucky. This is a dream job. I mean, where else do you get to work on such an important and far-reaching project with a team of just absolutely awesome people. We’ve built this amazing platform in just a few years, and we still are able to cover important questions like Beastmaster or Krull on Slack. It doesn’t get any better than that.

Now that you’re starting to work with presses of different sizes, how do you adapt to different workflows?

The big thing I’ve noticed is that getting to EPUB is not always an easy reach for some publishers. They can get to it, but it’s roundabout—exporting from InDesign or Google Docs—and they don’t have that same fundamental control over them or the experience of breaking into the EPUB and doing the fine tuning.

For most university presses, that’s not going to be an issue—they’ll do it in house with Scribe or P-Shift or they’ll outsource it to a vendor who can do it for them. In those cases, you’re going to get something that works just fine. We’ve tested EPUB files from a host of different vendors, and we’ve never had any problem—they all work in Manifold.

For smaller or newer publishers, getting to that point is not always as easy, which is why it’s so nice to have support for Word and Google Doc ingestion. Likewise for those willing to branch out to Markdown and HTML. Markdown, I think, is an easy reach, and if you’re open to that, that’s great. I’m all about the Markdown.

Me, too!

Really? Are you trying it?

Yeah--I am working on a book for a friend because she teaches books that are out of copyright. Her class chose an early American novel, Hope Leslie, that has no EPUB but exists on the Internet Archive as a PDF and in OCRed plaintext. It’s super messy and I’m teaching myself how to structure it in Markdown. The plan is to get it up on CUNY Manifold so she can teach with it. If I trusted my ability to program, I’d run some scripts, but I’m mostly cleaning by hand.

So you’re just taking the dirty OCR and running some scripts on it and making it look good?

More like I am running find and replace.

I’ve done that a lot of times—and even just doing that, I’ve found, is a big step up and often very useful for those around you. Most of the “scripts” I’ve written are simply just chains of find and replace.

Which leads me to the question about smaller presses--for the presses that don’t have EPUB production built into their system, how much do you anticipate in terms of teaching?

It’ll be a lot of prep work and dialoguing. Talking to all the pilot programs before I go out for my in-person training to see what their workflows look like and getting some sample files. I’m looking to craft a roadmap and a process that a publisher can easily use and replicate as a sort of touchstone that they can later spring from into more complex or creative uses of the platform. And hopefully during the training, we can work through the bulk of the big questions in person. After that I expect there will still be a host of fringe questions that we can take care of in a venue like this [a web call] or in our Slack channel. It’s really cool to have the #Pilot channel on Slack so that people who have similar sorts of approaches or levels of experience are able to interact directly with one another and get good practical feedback.

Very cool! We advocate conversation and community.

That’s the way you learn! It’s nice to be put in touch with others grappling with similar issues and to dynamically engage with those questions. A lot of times you don’t know who to talk to or reach out to, and to have that built into the fabric of our program is really cool.

Can you give a list of technical skills or aptitudes that you think would be important for a Manifold editor at a press?

Zach and his team have made it amazingly easy to get stuff into the system and looking beautiful. So the first response that bubbles up for me is to say something like, I don’t think you need a bunch of technical know-how . . .

I’ve told people that it can help to have some familiarity_ _with Markdown, a basic text editor, maybe Wordpress or some HTML.

Yeah, that’s a more useful answer. I’d say CSS as well. If you’ve even done some cursory work with CSS or HTML, you’re going to be just fine.

And really, all the heavy lifting will be in file prep. If for whatever reason you’re working with file types that Manifold can’t ingest natively, then it’s going to be about being willing to stretch yourself and not being afraid of technology. Nothing that anybody does is going to break anything. If you encounter problems, we’re going to be there to help. The big thing is not to be afraid, embrace the different tools that are available, cultivate a pioneering spirit, and just experiment. You don’t have to know exactly what you’re doing, but if you’re willing to throw yourself out there, then you’re going to be just fine. And more than likely you’re going to find it’s a lot easier than you expect. You might hit a few initial road bumps, but once you’ve cleared them you’ll see this is a lot different or easier and not as cumbersome as you imagined it to be. Especially with Manifold.

It helps to have some understanding of where different operations take place.

Oh definitely. And that guides us as we are creating documentation. It’s really important to understand how things are working and how you can affect what you’re seeing on screen. In a conference call recently I had a question about linked footnotes, and the person on the call asked if Manifold was automating that process, automatically creating a link between the text and the note. (Manifold isn’t doing that; it’s simply honoring the source document’s links.) That’s not clear when you’re just coming to this. So we are working really hard to make sure that those kinds of questions have good answers in our documentation. That if you aren’t sure how something works or how to change what you’re seeing, there’s an answer with clear steps you can take to get the results you want.

So having some basic skills helps, but truly if you can create a document on a computer, you can create a Manifold project?

Yeah. If you can navigate a web page and use a browser, working in Manifold isn’t harder than that.

What do you anticipate with the presses to come? Do you have particular things you’re looking out for?

I’m sure there will be lots of obstacles, but I’ll be doing my homework ahead of time so I can be as prepared as possible when I’m out there. I’m versed in Mac and PC systems, but it’s been awhile since I’ve used a PC—Nebraska was PC-based and I know a lot of university presses are—so I’m going to dust off my old desktop beforehand to make sure I’m fluent again with those systems. But then in terms of production, it’s going to be interesting to see where they’re leaving off Word, if they’re leaving off Word and getting to other document types. Because almost everyone we talked to can get to PDF, but as you know Manifold doesn’t do PDF in the reader. So what is the step before? And then exploring what they’re doing and how to get from there into Manifold. That’ll be interesting, but I don’t think it’s going to be difficult. I think it’ll be more about navigating the procedural nuances for the different houses.

Do you have a sense of how many people will be in your training sessions?

I’ll know beforehand. The first press, Athabasca, is around eight people, I believe. Usually it’ll be pretty production-oriented, but some will be coming from editorial and some will just be from different backgrounds who have the bandwidth and the gusto. When I go out, I’ll be doing a general overview for everyone so they have an idea of “what is this thing we signed up for?”, getting an appreciation for what Manifold can do for them and having the opportunity to ask questions, before breaking off into smaller focus groups. It tends to work best when you have eight to ten people crowding around a computer and a couple monitors—you can really get into the nitty gritty and get some good work accomplished that way.

Do the presses have collections they have pinpointed?

Most of them yes. Some have works coming down the pipe.

Have you ever been to any of the presses before?

Not a one!

Have you been to any of the cities?

I’ve been to Atlanta before. I’ve never been to Canada . . .

You’ve never been to Canada? Who are you?

The guy who’s never been to Canada. I’ve never been to the UK, and I’ve never been to Jamaica. I’ve not been to Temple.

Have you been to Philadelphia?

Yes. And I’ve run up the steps. And yes. I’ll be running up the steps again. I’ve been to Seattle, but not to the press.I’ve never been to Bloomington, Indiana, or Cincinnati. The only things I know about Cincinnati I learned from WKRP in Cincinnati—so not much.

What will you read on the plane?

I don’t know! I’m just finishing Don’t Look Behind You by Samuel Rogers. I’ve got a few books on the nightstand that will make good travel fare. I’ve never read the Harry Potter books._Ever?_Ever. I read the first one not that long ago. It was really good! I have the second one just waiting for me.(At this point I recommended the Witch, Please podcast.)That sounds cool. I don’t know what else I’m going to queue up. Do you know of the Flavia De Luce books?

I know of them—my mother shares my New York Public Library account and sometimes books just show up. I’m sure I’m going to have one or two of those. I know I’ve got a physics book. And Neil Gaiman’s _Norse Mythology.__Do you have any last things to say in preparation for Travels with Terence?_I’m just really excited to get started. Really honored to have the chance to work with these publishers and help them use Manifold to produce some really exciting and important works.

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