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About Berkshire PublishingBerkshire Publishing Group specializes in international relations, cross-cultural communication, global business and economic information, and environmental sustainability. For over a decade, readers curious about their world have turned to award-winning, global library reference titles created by Berkshire Publishing Group. Berkshire knows how to create valuable academic resources on popular, cutting-edge topics: the result of dynamic collaboration with extraordinary worldwide networks of scholars, thinkers, editors, and authors. Berkshire was founded in 1998 as a specialist academic book development company, and worked with major U.S. and U.K. publishers to develop global reference titles that were published under the Routledge, Sage, Scribners, Macmillan, and other imprints. At the end of 2004, Berkshire began releasing its own titles, beginning with the 5-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History (McNeill et al.). Berkshire is small and independent. While there's been massive consolidation in the publishing industry in recent years, Berkshire is bucking the trend, as an independent imprint that intends to stay that way. We share the belief of many of our customers, readers, and other friends and fans: independent voices are needed more than ever. The company’s headquarters are in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, a town of 7,700 people located in the southern Berkshire Hills. W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) grew up in Great Barrington and his global thinking and activism inspires Berkshire Publishing today. (For more about the Berkshire Hills, please visit our Berkshire page.) Before founding Berkshire, Karen Christensen had had a brief publishing career in London, where she worked on scientific journals at Blackwell Science and also on the T. S. Eliot’s Letters at Faber & Faber. She is an environmental author as well as a publisher, with books translated into many languages including Chinese. Berkshire publications are both authoritative and accessible, meeting the needs of students in high schools as well as universities and are widely used by professionals, too, in business and nonprofit organizations, for convenient reference outside their areas of expertise. We don’t just ask Who, What, When, and Where? but also the more difficult and important Why? How?
Berkshire publications are award winnersWe’re a team of less than a dozen employees, yet we’ve won more library reference awards than companies ten or even a hundred times our size, and we've created works, a librarian told us, that "redefined what reference is all about."
In 2003, while still a book development company, Berkshire won two out of thirteen coveted places on the national ALA/RUSA Outstanding Reference Sources list, with its six-volume, 2.2-million-word Encyclopedia of Modern Asia (Scribners/Sage) and four-volume Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment (Berkshire/Sage). This was 16% of the list by title and 25% by number of volumes. The first Berkshire titles were similarly well-received, winning awards from Booklist, Library Journal, and Choice, and the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction was a 2005 YBP computer science bestseller. Berkshire has a reputation for being future focused. This was particularly striking when terrorists brought down the twin towers on 11 September 2001. Berkshire’s Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism (part of the Religion & Society series with Routledge) was being printed. The Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, the 4-volume publication Berkshire developed to launch Sage Reference, appeared only a few months later, with last-minute updates related to global terrorism. Soon afterwards, Berkshire’s definitive Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, with over 700 contributors from 65 countries, appeared in a beautiful 6-volume print edition that is still widely known and used in print and digital formats. That encyclopedia, which provided a foundation for more recent China-focused publishing, was particularly timely because from its inception, three years earlier, we had included broad coverage of central and southwest Asia, including Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. Berkshire publications are global“Sorting the sum of human endeavors and presenting students with a coherent plan of study is no easy task, but [in creating the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World History] a winning combination of distinguished historians and a seasoned editorial staff has proven more than equal to this massive undertaking.” – John Lawrence, “Lawrence Looks at Books” “A monumental undertaking, [the International Encyclopedia of Women and Sports, edited by Christensen et al.] covers women’s sports worldwide and throughout history … A scholarly resource for public libraries and school at all levels, middle school through college.” – Library Journal “[The International Encyclopedia of Women and Sports contains] engaging illustrations and photos, as well as numerous sidebars, tables and charts … [and] a sense of scope and comprehensiveness not afforded by other sports references.” – Against the Grain Berkshire publications are unique and interdisciplinary“[Berkshire's Patterns of Global Terrorism] offers a great service to policy makers, journalists, researchers, and the general public … [It] provides context, coherence, and thorough access.” – Reference & Research Book News “Works like the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction play a valuable role in lending definition to emerging, interdisciplinary fields of study.” – Against the Grain “The Encyclopedia of Leadership is a model of a modern reference book … [it] belongs in the personal collection of every person seriously interested in leadership, whether as student, scholar, or practitioner.” – Compass "Incredibly, [the Encyclopedia of Community: From the Village to the Virtual World] is the first encyclopedia to focus on community as concept and experience, so stands alone in its field as the one title any library must buy to cover this topic. . . . Essential. All readerships.” – Choice
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