During the Twin Ports Festival of History, Phil Sher gave a speech about the history of the Lithuanian Jewish community in Duluth. Phil is the author of a recent book, Adas Israel, available on Amazon, that was a product of a unique partnership between the University of Minnesota Duluth and the community.
As a department at the University of Minnesota Duluth, it's our job to connect our students to the community and, where we can, to serve the community directly. That is part of the land grant mission of the university, the federal law of 150 years ago that established the University of Minnesota to serve the citizens of the state, instead of the children of the affluent (as private colleges served at the time).
So when David Beard heard that Phil was working on this project, he knew that he could help. He served as copyeditor, first, then graphic designer.
The graphic design was done using software called "Pressbooks." Pressbooks looks a lot like Wordpress. But everyone in Minnesota with a library card has free access to Pressbooks through the Minnesota Library Publishing Project (MLPP). You can activate your own account in Pressbooks here: https://mlpp.pressbooks.pub/, entirely free so long as you have a current Minnesota library card.
Pressbooks exports to filetypes usable by Amazon, which makes the book available widely.
According to Beard, "It was a joy to work with Phil to make his story, and the story of his community, widely available. It's both an archival masterwork, with translations of Yiddish documents that might otherwise be lost to time. It's also a solid story of the history of Duluth -- so many businesses and institutions alive in our lives today trace their history back decades to members of the Adas Israel community. And finally, it's more than a little bit a touching memoir of Phil and his beloved wife."
For more information about the Program in Writing Studies, see: https://cahss.d.umn.edu/elws