Conny Lenz‘s visit to Stirling was impressive and meaningful for us. She is a Publishing Studies alumna and digital publishing assistant at Cengage Learning. Conny Lenz introduced her route into publishing and her current job at Cengage Learning.

First of all, she began by expressing her personal feelings about the Stirling publishing course. She thinks this course is very helpful, because it provides a sound overview of the publishing industry, teaches students how to finish marketing and sales tasks, trains students of all kinds of ability through dummy projects, and helps students accomplish their dissertation. Her words inspired us to move forward.

Conny then went on to talk about her route into publishing. She mentioned that internships are very important, and she advised us to contact as many publishing recruiters as possible. She also mentioned that we could use social networks like LinkedIn for our careers. She stressed the importance of competitor awareness in interviews.

Maybe because some of us are not familiar with library reference, Conny introduced the work that library reference does. It needs to source content from libraries and institutions, such as The National Archives, British Library and Royal Archives. It needs to assess, oversee and manage the digitisation of the content. It will determine design and layout of product and images. Providing marketing and sales teams with documentation and information on the product is also a part of its work.

Next, Conny presented how digital archives were created and how to use the search engine of the Daily Mail Historical Archive.

The next topic focused on her current work at Cengage Learning. Her first project was Nineteenth Century Collections Online. The second project was the management of the transfer of seven products from one platform to another. The third project was the State Papers Online, Eighteenth Century Part 1. The fourth project is Punch Historical Archive 1841-1992. She showed her projects by using a lot of images of raw materials and the process of designing these library references, and which fully showed her work at Cengage Learning.

This is an informative session about library reference, and I think the whole class will agree we learned a lot during this speaking. Thanks, Conny!

-Xiaolin Ma

Tweets from Conny’s Visiting Speaker session have been Storified here.