Being knowledgeable of local publishers and the types of materials they produce and print are extremely important to community building in libraries of all types. By being able to introduce a patron looking for local historical reference materials to a nearby publisher whose focus is local history, it can create connections within the community that can have a beneficial impact on a larger group.

For this marked discussion, we were tasked with doing exactly that; identifying and researching local publishers and discussing what types of materials they printed and why. The three publishers I chose to focus on all created waves in their communities in different ways, one focusing on adapting books from English to French for their French Canadian patrons while another bound books using traditional methods to keep the practice alive.

Lastly, in analyzing the works that each of these publishers produced, I speculated which types of libraries and places of learning would purchase from them, resulting in fairly different patron bases and collections.

Continuous publications also known as serials play an important roll in many libraries, ranging from monthly magazine subscriptions to yearly reference material distributions. Understanding the way that annual publications such as these work and how often they're published is an important job of the acquisitions department in libraries that order them, as any organization or institution can have as many as one hundred different subscriptions running at any given time and it's important they're managed and circulated properly.

For this particular assignment, we were tasked with analyzing two different magazines, one in print and one digital, and finding the information that a Library would likely keep track of in a subscription system. Information such as the publication frequency and issue or volume number is often the most important along with the International Standardized Serial Number, as this allows for the serial to be tracked in the system and weeded out when it is no longer relevant.

This assignment while different from the others in this course was extremely important in learning the way that information is pulled from different types of materials. For example, most books currently published have a title and copyright page that contains most of the information gathered in this assignment. On the other hand, in serials, the same information is not necessarily together, often in different parts of the magazine meaning it is important for cataloguers and library staff to become familiar with serial publications and how to find information within them.