- Begin early to gather feedback about your book
- 38,000 students to use Flat World Knowledge open source texts this fall
- Ten free high school math, science digital textbooks meet CA content standards
- Cengage to rent textbooks
- McGraw-Hill Education, Chegg.com partner to rent textbooks
- Publisher provides collaborative, entrepreneurial environment for authors
- AAP spokesman talks about benefits of Book Rights Registry
- Google Search settlement agreement opt-out deadline Sept. 4
- Nominate your textbook for a 2010 TAA Texty, McGuffey Award
- TAA Executive Director's Message: Authoring ideas flowed
- Listen to podcast on time management
- Former TAA Council Secretary Mary Kay Switzer and Walter Cronkite
- Generating & Refining Research Ideas, Part One
- Former TAA President L. Kathy Heilenman dies
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Begin early to gather feedback about your book
Beginning early to gather feedback about your intentions for a new book can provide authors with valuable insights on whether or not an idea will gain traction, says Social Media Bible co-author David Brake.
“What authors are doing is leveraging the collective wisdom of their audience for their book, and by doing that, they’re establishing a community, they’re developing relationships, and they’re finding people who will connect with other people. So if they like the book, they’re going to tell other people about the book. Now, that’s hard work, but if you do it right, it is a wonderful organic blend of using your audience as co-producers of the content.”
Listen to a CCC Beyond the Book podcast, "Your Readers are Your Authors," at http://beyondthebookcast.com/your-readers-are-your-co-authors
38,000 students to use Flat World Knowledge open source texts this fall
This Fall, 38,000 college students at 350 colleges will use Flat World Knowledge's (FWK) open source college textbooks. That number is up dramatically from the only 1,000 FWK open source texts used by college students at 30 colleges in Spring 2009.
The increased adoption of Flat World’s free and low-cost open source textbooks follows two semesters of successful in-classroom trials. During Spring 2009 trials, Flat World textbooks were shown to reduce average textbook costs to only $18 per student per class, an 82 percent cost reduction compared to traditional printed textbooks averaging $100 per student per class.
“We’ll save college students and their families nearly $3 million in textbook expenses this semester,” said Eric Frank, Flat World Knowledge co-founder. “We’re on track to expand to 50,000 students in Spring 2010 and 120,000 students in Fall 2010. By the conclusion of 2010, Flat World will have conservatively saved 200,000 students over $15 million.”
In response to instructor and student demand, Flat World Knowledge has increased the number of titles under development. To date, the company’s titles have focused exclusively on business and economics. Flat World recently added titles to its pipeline in Introduction to Psychology, Introduction to Sociology, College Success, Genetics, and more.
Flat World currently has 32 new titles in development, and by Summer 2010 will have 50 titles in development.
Digital textbooks have gained increased nationwide attention over the past two years as a potential solution to the problem of high textbook costs. Yet, several digital-only field trials including those using digital e-reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle, have demonstrated mixed results because they forced rigid constraints upon students.
Flat World has succeeded by allowing students to consume the textbooks as they choose, said Frank. Students can access entire textbooks for free online over Web browsers; pay $19.95 for a PDF download; pay $29.95 for a black and white printed version or $59.95 for a color version, or pay $39.95 for an audio version. Books are available by the book or by the chapter. Students can also purchase digital study aids like audio study guides, online quizzes, digital flashcards, and more. Flat World’s approach is device agnostic, so students can use the books on their laptops, netbooks, favorite e-reading devices, web-enabled mobile phone, or by reading a traditional print copy.
“Traditional textbooks have clearly failed students and instructors,” added Frank. “Similarly, digital textbook trials that force a single format, device, or price point will also fail. No single e-reading format or device will ever satisfy all students. “Our commercial open source textbook approach puts the control and the power of choice in the hands of students and instructors.”
Ten free high school math, science digital textbooks meet CA content standards
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has released the first report of California’s free digital textbook initiative - which outlines how high school math and science textbooks submitted under the first phase of the initiative measure up against the state’s rigorous academic content standards.
Of the 16 free digital textbooks for high school math and science reviewed, ten meet at least 90 percent of California’s standards. Four meet 100 percent of standards, including the CK-12 Foundation’s CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry, CK-12 Chemistry and Dr. H. Jerome Keisler’s Elementary Calculus: An Infinitesimal Approach.
Launched by the Governor in May 2009, the free digital textbook initiative is designed to ensure California’s students have access to high-quality, cost-effective instructional materials and to open the door to a more technologically advanced education system. In California, local high school districts are responsible for adopting standards-aligned textbooks for use in the classroom. The reviewed digital textbooks are available for schools to use this fall.
The digital books are downloadable and may be projected on a screen, viewed on a computer, printed chapter by chapter, or bound for use in the classroom, allowing schools to use existing hardware, even in classrooms without computers or laptops for every student.
To showcase the multiple ways in which digital textbooks can be used, the California Educational Technology Professionals Association (CETPA) hosted 200 educators, technology professionals and content providers for a digital textbook symposium at the Orange County Department of Education on August 19, 2009. Teachers led students through lesson plans using digital textbooks in four mock classrooms, demonstrating the materials’ interactive potential. CETPA also moderated panel discussions about the future of digital education and potential next steps in this innovative effort.
The California Learning Resource Network (CLRN), a CDE Statewide Educational Technology Services project, facilitated the reviews. Reviewers were responsible for confirming whether materials fully, partially or did not meet State Board of Education adopted standards for geometry, algebra II, trigonometry, calculus, physics, chemistry, biology/life science and earth science.
The full text of the review report and links to each textbook download and their corresponding standards alignment documents are available on CLRN’s Web site at http://www.clrn.org/fdti.
Cengage to rent textbooks
Textbook publisher Cengage Learning is the first textbook publisher to offer textbook rentals directly to students through a new site called CengageBrain.com.
The new site will launch in December 2009 with an initial offering of several hundred titles for rent, followed by a more comprehensive roll-out of titles available for rent in July 2010.
The site will provide students with the choice to rent or purchase the company's textbooks, e-Books, e-Chapters, Audio Books and Digital Homework Solutions. CengageBrain.com will serve as the expanded version of the company's current iChapters.com (link).
Titles will be available at a cost of 40 to 70 percent less than the suggested retail price. Cengage publishes under the imprints Heinle, Gale, Wadsworth, Delmar, Brooks/Cole and South-Western.
The rental process will be simple and convenient for customers. Students who choose the rental option will have immediate access to the first chapter of the book in e-book format and will also have a choice of shipping options. Once the rental term is complete, students can either choose to print a return label from CengageBrain.com and ship the textbook back, or purchase the title.
According to the New York Times, Ronald G. Dunn, president and chief executive of Cengage, said that authors will get royalties on second and third rentals, just as they would on a first sale.
McGraw-Hill Education, Chegg.com partner to rent textbooks
K-12 school textbook publisher McGraw-Hill Education and online textbook rental company Chegg.com, are launching pilot shared-revenue program in which McGraw-Hill will provide new print textbooks directly to Chegg for its online rental business. This first-of-its-kind collaboration will provide McGraw-Hill with a new revenue stream and allow Chegg to expand the supply of textbooks that students can rent from its service.
Traditionally, McGraw-Hill has received payment only for the initial purchase of a textbook by a distributor or bookstore. These channel partners typically resold the products to students and bought them back at the end of the semester to resell again. Under this agreement, McGraw-Hill will share in the rental revenues throughout the life of each McGraw-Hill title in the pilot program.
"We are pleased to enter into this innovative collaboration with Chegg, which creates an entirely new revenue source for the company and marks our entrance into the growing textbook rental market -- a model we plan to build upon through other channels, including bookstores," said Ed Stanford, president, McGraw-Hill Higher Education.
Said Jim Safka, chief executive officer, Chegg.com: "At Chegg we not only want to help students realize significant savings by renting their textbooks, but we also want to give them immediate access to every textbook title that they need. So it made perfect sense for us to collaborate with McGraw-Hill on a shared revenue program, furthering our mission of offering students the lowest price, most eco-friendly solution for college textbooks."
Online textbook rentals have been growing in popularity for years, and certain McGraw-Hill titles have been available through Chegg's online textbook rental service since Chegg began nationwide operations in 2007. This agreement creates a first-ever direct working relationship between a publisher and textbook rental company, wherein Chegg will source all of its rental inventory directly from McGraw-Hill. The agreement also creates a rental-revenue-sharing pilot covering a series of 25 McGraw-Hill Higher Education titles available for rental on the Chegg website (http://www.chegg.com)
For each of the 25 titles selected for the revenue-sharing pilot, McGraw-Hill and Chegg will share the revenue received on each rental throughout the life of the textbook. Textbooks are often rented five or more times before they are retired, and, according to Chegg, the rental life of a textbook is often longer than the life of the published edition. The purpose of the pilot program is to establish the economics of renting textbooks in a live-market test. The 2009-2010 school year will be used to determine the success of the pilot program and the value of an expanded partnership and revenue-sharing model between McGraw-Hill Education and Chegg.
Publisher provides collaborative, entrepreneurial environment for authors
by Kim Seidel
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A new company, Wohl Publishing, Inc. (http://wohlpublishing.com), is offering college textbook authors a fresh publishing model that fills the gap between large, traditional publishers and the difficult route of self-publishing.
Wohl Publishing, Inc.’s Founder and CEO Rich Wohl, who has worked at traditional college textbook publishers Allyn & Bacon, Prentice Hall, Addison Wesley Longman, and Lippincott Williams and Wilkins, said his company strives to provide greater attention, collaboration and resources to authors.
“We provide the financial and organizational resources of a traditional publisher, but do so within a very collaborative and entrepreneurial publishing environment,” he said.
This new model grew out of conversations Wohl has had with many successful authors about their textbook experiences.
“The key observation they all shared is that over the years, college publishers have been forced to prioritize their organizational structure, investment decisions, and sales strategies around large introductory courses,” he said. “To do this, they have had to divert editorial and sales resources – people, dollars, and time – away from the mid and upper level undergraduate courses, even when the authors and books that serve those markets are successful and profitable.”
With their targeted group of textbook authors – mid and upper level undergraduate courses – they can offer a more effective sales effort with customers, said Wohl.
“The key to selling success is having sales representatives with deep product knowledge of their own books and of their competitors’, as well as having close relationships and frequent contact with the faculty decision makers,” he said.
Because their titles are not competing with introductory titles for the attention of their sales sales reps, and because these mid and upper level texts are always their reps top priority, their sales reps can increase their product knowledge and the time they spend talking with faculty about these books, said Wohl. “We also have the opportunity to promote every text, every year, not just in its first year of publication.”
Wohl Publishing’s author compensation model is also different than other publishers’ models. It is a unique profit-sharing model that is in addition to and above the traditional author royalty rate, says Wohl: “We believe that successful authors should share in the financial contribution made by their text.”
Wohl plans to implement several new products and pricing strategies for discouraging the purchase of used copies of his authors’ textbooks.
“We have a strong belief in the value of intellectual property and the importance of rewarding authors who create it,” he said. “We believe that authors are central to the entire publishing and decision-making process and that our level of commitment and resources should match that of our authors.”
Kim Seidel is a professional writer in Onalaska, Wis.
AAP spokesman talks about benefits of Book Rights Registry
On July 15, The Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) interviewed Allan Adler, vice president for Legal and Governmental Affairs in the Washington, DC office of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), about the benefits the Google Settlement and the creation of the Book Rights Registry could potentially provide to authors and publishers. Listen to a podcast of the discussion on the CCC Copyright Education page: Click here
Google Search settlement agreement opt-out deadline Sept. 4
The deadline for opting out or objecting to the Google Book Search Settlement Agreement is September 4, 2009. Authors of both in-print and out-of print books can opt-out from the entire settlement, and retain their rights to sue Google for infringement. Authors of in-print books will have their books included only if they opt-in, and authors of out-of print books will have their books excluded only if they opt-out. They can also ask Google to remove any previously scanned books.
Textbook Authoring in the Digital Age, Part One
by Mary Ellen Lepionka
On August 19, 2009, I finally saw in print a statement echoing my long-held belief that the business of textbook publishing is truly in a state of radical (some would say, catastrophic) change. The statement was in a Courthouse News Service summary of a suit brought by a group of stockholders against their company, Barnes & Noble.
B&N had just bought BN College, its own spin-off private company, for nearly $600 million. BN College is a chain of more than 600 campus bookstores serving nearly 4 million college students and a quarter of a million faculty members. The stores provide textbooks, ancillary materials, trade books, and other goods through exclusive supply chains, especially Barnes & Noble.
The suit claimed that this acquisition lacks transparency (it enriches B&N’s CEO, who has a controlling interest in BN College), wastes corporate assets, and increases shareholders’ exposure to risk (potentially reducing their earnings), because, QUOTE: With used textbooks available on the Internet and rental textbooks available at 40 percent to 70 percent off sale price, the college textbook business has entered ‘permanent decline’ END QUOTE (http://www.courthousenews.com/2009/08/19/ Shareholders_Fight_Barnes_&_Noble_Deal.htm).
There it is: permanent decline (and note that lawyers, not the publishing industry, first uttered these words in print.) I couldn’t agree more and first said as much in 2007 upon news of three precipitous events that struck me as particularly ominous:
- In 2007 the government responded officially to the CALPIRG price revolt, which started in 2004 and was being strongly reinforced by the mushrooming open access movement. Congress’s Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance called for free and low cost textbooks and facilitated access to used textbooks, textbook rentals, digital textbooks, and textbook lending libraries (http://www.ed.gov/about/bdscomm/list/acsfa/edlite-index.html). The current international member roll of the OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://www.ocwconsortium.org/members/consortium-members.html) attests to the success of the open access movement, which has reached critical mass alongside the wiki-textbook phenomenon (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/).
- The Thomson Corporation promptly sold all its higher education imprints. (Thomson Learning had included, for example, Wadsworth, Delmar, Heinle, Brooks/Cole, South-Western, West, and Gale—most of which became Cengage.) In a parallel development, publishers in other parts of the industry began to dump their soon-to-be no-longer-so-lucrative scholarly journals.
- CourseSmart was founded the same year, in which industry giants (including Cengage)—once to-the-death rivals—suddenly teamed up to try to appear to be complying with public mandates while propping up prices before it was too late. (In addition to Cengage, the CourseSmart club currently includes Bedford, Freeman & Worth, CQ, Elsevier, F.A. Davis, Wiley, Jones & Bartlett, McGraw-Hill Higher Ed, Nelson Ed, Pearson, Sage, Sinauer, Taylor & Francis, and Wolters Kluwer.)
And now that the actual curse has been spat (that the college textbook business is in permanent decline), there is no going back. The tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell would say, has been reached and passed (http://www.gladwell.com/tippingpoint/index.html). The question now is, how can textbook authors survive, perhaps even thrive, in this giveaway Digital Age. I see four essential, broad, brave new world measures (Are there more?:
- Negotiate electronic rights separately with commercial publishers. Do not sign away any “content”. Demand adequate royalty consideration in textbook rentals, the sale of e-textbooks, and the sale of digitized textbook content (not to mention foreign textbook sales and other deeply discounted sales).
- Keep alive and find ways to promote and publicize the values of authority, validity, credibility, accuracy, currency, and reliability in the authorship of reviewed expository text. Use the new social media to communicate these values. Develop and disseminate guidelines for assessing the quality of online textbooks and for building them. Promote yourself as an expert. Have things to say, and say them in online forums.
- Author high-quality online textbooks though new publishing models that will not pauperize you for your efforts. Some entrepreneurial online textbook publishers offer royalties, for example. Some combine both free and monetized layers of access to their textbooks and supplements, allowing them to be profitable. Some also act as academic portals, providing comprehensive web site support for users of their products. Depending on your qualifications and market, ability to invest, and desire to have a business, self-publishing is also an option.
- Sell your content in bits, as learning objects or modules, for example, or share your content on sites that earn money for you through some means other than sales of your content—through blog subscription, for example, or under the auspices of an organization that has publication grants or does profit sharing through advertising revenues (or other sources of income besides donations).
Thus, the statement that the college textbook business is in permanent decline must be modified. It’s only the traditional business model for commercial textbook publishing that is going the way of the dinosaurs. The world truly needs the stuff of good textbooks. In whole or in part, they are here to stay. Textbook authors need to defend the world’s right to good textbooks along with their right to earn a decent living from writing them.
Mary Ellen Lepionka is the founder of Atlantic Path Publishing (www.atlanticpathpublishing.com), author of Writing and Developing Your College Textbook (2008) and Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements (2005), a consultant and content provider to textbook authors and publishers, and a member of the Text and Academic Authors Association.
Related Article:
Nominate your textbook for a 2010 TAA Texty, McGuffey Award
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Nominations are now being accepted for 2010 TAA Textbook Excellence Awards ("Textys) and McGuffey Longevity Awards ("McGuffeys"). Deadline for nominations is October 15, 2009.
For the first time this year, textbooks can be nominated by both authors and publishers. Textys recognize excellence in current textbooks and learning materials. McGuffeys recognize textbooks and learning materials whose excellence has been demonstrated over time (15 years or more).
The 2010 Texty and McGuffey Awards will be presented at the TAA Awards Ceremony, which will be held at TAA's Annual Conference in Minneapolis, MN on June 26. Each winning author and the book's publisher receives a leather bookmark embossed with the Texty or McGuffey logo and the recipient's name and year.
To nominate your book for a Texty or McGuffey Award, or ask TAA to ask your publisher to nominate your book, visit the TAA Awards section.
McGuffey Awards
2010 Author Nomination Form
2010 Publisher Nomination FormTexty Awards
2010 Author Nomination Form
2010 Publisher Nomination Form
View the 2009 Texty and McGuffey Award winners: Click here
TAA Executive Director: Authoring ideas flowed
from August 2009 issue of The Academic Author
 TAA Executive Director Richard T. Hull |
TAA's conference in San Antonio June 25-27 attracted 80 registrants, a record for the organization. This annual conference has evolved into an interesting meld of advanced academic and textbook instruction, current news, one-on-one mentoring, ideas for using social networks for marketing, and honing the craft of academic authoring, all in the mix of individuals whose authoring experience ranges from none to hundreds of articles and dozens of books. And the meeting's size gives each attendee the opportunity to interact and network with any other attendee.
Growth in the organization has topped 1,900, and the Council has wisely decided to slow growth and consolidate services to those already members. Thus, fewer workshops will be supported by TAA in the current fiscal year, but the chapter program will increase to four; the number of teleconferences on a wide variety of topics will be continued; content from the conference will be made available on the TAA website; and a new database will enable better communications to members.
TAA Foundation, the independent partner of TAA, has landed its first grant this past spring from the Florida Department of Education, and is now conducting a pilot program that partners with Palm Beach Community College to encourage academic writing skills in gifted, underserved populations of high school students intent on careers in biomedical and environmental technology. TAA members are serving as mentors in this effort. The results will form the basis both for academic research articles and further grant applications.
Thus, linked processes of renewal and consolidation are the mechanics of the TAA/TAAF partnership as we move into TAA's 22nd and TAAF's 6th year.
TAA and TAAF, the organization and the foundation, depend of TAA's members in countless ways. Your input and financial support are crucial to the ongoing success of both.
Richard Hull,
TAA Executive Director
Listen to podcast on time management
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Listen to a podcast of the 2009 TAA Conference session on time management by psychologist and author Susan Robison, "What To Do When You Don't Have Time," on the Copyright Clearance Center's Beyond the Book site: http://beyondthebookcast.com.
Former TAA Council Secretary Mary Kay Switzer and Walter Cronkite
Below is a photo of Former TAA Council Secretary Mary Kay Switzer (far left) taken in 1999 at a PBS sponsored event that paid tribute to broadcasters who have made an impact on broadcasting---namely Walter Cronkite. Switzer was invited to head up a panel with Kronkite (second from left), Grace Fredricks (second from right) and Roone Arledge (far right) since she had done a number of reference works on broadcasting--including articles and books. Switzer was also one of the first women to anchor a newscast in the U.S. with a national sponsor.
Generating & Refining Research Ideas, Part One
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Join Dr. Sonja Foss, professor of communication at the University of Colorado, and Dr. William Waters, an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown, for a one-hour teleconference presenting a practical and concrete process for generating and refining original research ideas, on Monday, October 5 from 10-11 a.m. CT (8-9 a.m. Pacific; 9-10 a.m. Mountain; 11-12 p.m. Eastern). This teleconference is free for members.
The first part of this two-session teleconference (link to part two) will focus on how to find a possible research idea from the texts and data that surround you. This teleconference will cover:
- Finding a curious text or data that warrants a new disciplinary explanation.
- Coding the data broadly to discover the principal pieces needed to develop a new disciplinary explanation.
- Researching for an explanation that holds the pieces together and makes a contribution to your discipline.
- Developing and testing the explanatory schema.
Foss's research and teaching interests are in contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism, feminist perspectives on communication, the incorporation of marginalized voices into rhetorical theory and practice, and visual rhetoric. She is the author or coauthor of the books Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide to a Done Dissertation, Rhetorical Criticism, Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric, Inviting Transformation, Feminist Rhetorical Theories, and Women Speak. Her essays in communication journals have dealt with topics such as invitational rhetoric, agency in the film Run Lola Run, feminine spectatorship in Garrison Keillor's monologues, visual argumentation, and body art. Dr. Foss earned her Ph.D. in communication studies from Northwestern University and previously taught at Ohio State University, the University of Oregon, the University of Denver, Virginia Tech, and Norfolk State University.
Waters's research and teaching interests are in writing theory and practice, the history of the English language, linguistics, and modern grammar. He is the coauthor of Destination Dissertation: A Traveler's Guide to a Done Dissertation and was the managing editor of La Puerta: A Doorway into the Academy. He also has published several poems in national journals. Dr. Waters earned his Ph.D. in language and linguistics from the University of New Mexico and previously taught at the University of Maine; University College in Galway, Ireland; and Cheongbuk National University in Korea.
Sign up for Foss and Waters teleconference:
Not a member? Join TAA
Former TAA President L. Kathy Heilenman dies
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to the Rolling Dog Ranch Animal Sanctuary, 400 Rolling Dog Ranch Lane, Ovando, Montana, 59854. Online condolences and remembrances may be posted at http://www.lensingfuneral.com or The University of Iowa web site |
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TAA Past President L. Kathy Heilenman died July 31, 2009 after a lengthy struggle with breast cancer. She was 64.
Heilenman was an associate professor of French and Italian at the University of Iowa, and taught courses in Second Language Acquisition, Foreign Language Education, and French language. She was also a founding co-director of Foreign Language Acquisition Research and Education (FLARE) and its doctoral program in Second Language Acquisition. She was the lead author of Voilà, a first-year college French textbook, now in its fourth edition. Her work also appears in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes.
She served as president of the Text and Academic Authors Association from 1994 to 1995. During that time, she served as chair on a TAA Committee that developed TAA's "Position Statement on the Academic Value of Textbooks" (Click here to view). TAA profiled Heilenman in its Notable Author series in 1998. (Click to read the profile).
She was a graduate of Eastern High School in Middletown, Kentucky and received her doctoral degree in Foreign Language Education from the University of Louisville. Before coming to the University of Iowa in 1989, she taught French at middle school, high school, and post-secondary levels in Kentucky, Virginia, Illinois, and Louisiana. She served as the president of the Kentucky Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of French (1978), president of the American Association of University Supervisors, Coordinators, and Directors of Foreign Language Programs (1994-1996), and chair of the Research Special Interest Group of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (2000).
She touched directly the lives of the hundreds of students, young scholars, and colleagues who were fortunate enough to work with her, and indirectly the thousands of students who learned French through her textbook. In the past decade alone, she served as director or co-director of 10 dissertations and served on 35 committees for PhD, MA, undergraduate Honors, and International Programs students.
When not engaged in her academic activities, Kathy could always be found outdoors with her dogs. She loved her dogs (Bouviers and Border Collies) and the work they shared in several sports, especially herding. Through weekly lessons she generously shared her expertise with novice herding dog owners. Over many years she also competed in, taught, and judged dog obedience and agility.
A member and diligent supporter of the North American Working Bouvier Association (NAWBA), Kathy was known and respected by working dog fanciers throughout the world. She served terms as secretary and as president of the organization and could always be depended upon to share knowledge, provide leadership, and shoulder much of the load. Among her many NAWBA friends Kathy will always be remembered as a true leader, a tireless supporter, and an effective teacher not only about our canine partners, but about life itself. She also served the community through her work with 4–H clubs on dog obedience training.
She is survived by Daniel O’Leary, her husband of 30 years; her daughter Lisa Meyer Graft (Emmett Graft) and granddaughter Lauren Rose; and sisters Diane Heilenman (Harry Johns) and Christina Heilenman. She was preceded in death by her parents, George and Laura (O'Brien) Heilenman.
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