The History and Mission of 1s1 Press

Number 48 In 1980, I wrote an essay to describe the mission of 1S1 Press R'and introduce its director, Robert A, Day. I At that time, 1S1 Press was three years old and had just three titles to its credit. But I expressed optimism that many more titles would follow, and that 1S1 Press would become a full-fledged publisher of scho-arly books. Since then, and particularly this year, my optimism proved justified, In 1982, 1S1 Press published five outstanding new books, and a number of others are scheduled to appear in the near future, With all this activity at 1S1 Press, now seems to be a good time to reflect on its history and to reexamine its mission. 1S1 Press was born, in part, with our decision to publish a collection of my weekly Current Comments$'t essays in book form. I One practical reason for this decision was the need to satisfy the requests for copies of older essays. We might have approached an established publisher, but the decision to publish a continuing series of Essays of an Information Scientis@ ourselves was part of a long-term ambition to expand into book publishing. Thus, in 1977, 1S1 Press was officially established under the direction of my close friend, the late Robert L. Hayne.j Actually, long before we decided to publish Essays, Bob had been helping me implement a project I had started many years earlier. sonal experience, I realized that the Cyrillic alphabet presented certain barriers to learning and using Russian. But this was especially true for those who only occasionally needed to translate a short scientific paper or even an abstract. Like any exotic alphabet, the Cynllic alphabet obscures resemblances between words that are common or cog-nate to both Russian and English. More importantly, the order in which the letters in the Cyrillic alphabet appear differs from that of the Roman. This makes it time consuming to find words in a con-~entional Russian-English dictionary. I had long envisioned a transliterated dictionary to help overcome these problems .~ In 1979, 1S1 Press published the Transliterated Dictionary of the Russian Language.s Though initially operating on the scale of a small university press, 1S1 Press has enlarged its scope to publish a variety of books by, and for, scholars and professionals. We have defined 1S1 Press's mission broadly: to publish books and other materials dealing with the process of scholarly communication and the …