[GBW] digital publications

["James Reid-Cunningham" <reid-cunningham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wanted to respond to a number of posts last week on the topic of whether
to produce GBW publications in a digital format. I sometimes hesitate to
respond too quickly to posts from members, because I don't want to appear to
be stifling discussion by giving the "party line". I also don't want to
sound too defensive or crabby.

I am also torn about the issue of how I should respond to posts on the
listserv, because so few of our members actually opt to join the list.
Although virtually all members have an email address, less than one third
choose to receive the list. I often feel that if I want to communicate
something official to the membership, I should do it via a column in the
newsletter, because everyone receives the newsletter. But as we discovered
during the planning of our centennial conference in 2006, many members don't
read the president's column in the newsletter either.

So although we discussed the issue of digital publications during the annual
meeting in Toronto, and I have discussed it in the president's column in the
newsletter from time to time, I thought I'd respond to some of the concerns
raised last week.

The board has been wrestling off and on for two years with whether to issue
publications, especially the newsletter, in digital format. The reasons
almost always boil down to two: the potential to save money on printing and
postage; and the desire to be more cutting-edge, especially in the hopes of
attracting new, i.e., younger members. It is true that we could save some
money if the newsletter were to become a digital publication. As to
attracting more young members, we currently gain about 150 members per year,
and lose about 150 members per year. The overall number has been stable for
years. So we have to decide if we really should be working to increase the
size of the GBW. The grandly named Committee on the Future of the GBW is
working on this issue among others.

I'm not sure that our main goal should be to save money, if only because the
GBW is in good financial shape. We really don't have a lack of money; what
we have is a lack of time. This is a volunteer organization, and members are
always suggesting improvements to me, but only a limited number of
individuals keep the GBW active. At the national level, the GBW publishes a
newsletter and a journal, holds an annual conference, and has an exhibition
every three years. It is a miracle that we pull it all off, and I have long
felt that one of my roles, besides helping people to do their jobs, is to
prevent our enthusiasm from pushing us to overload our volunteers with even
more work. Every good idea is more work for someone, and the work always
expands over time. Burn-out is a real issue, as anyone who has served on the
board will tell you.

All of the chapters have at least a few thousand dollars banked because they
simply don't have enough volunteers to plan enough events to spend all their
yearly dues. So to go over to publishing the newsletter digitally in order
to provide funds for other activities may not actually result in more
activities, especially at the chapter level.

Lower printing and postage fees are not likely to make a great deal of
difference in the budget of the GBW unless a sizeable number of members opt
for the digital version only. Our most recent numbers suggest that we would
need well over 50% of the membership to choose digital instead of the paper
document before we could really begin to save much. Given that so few of our
members opt to join the member list, do we really have a sizeable contingent
who want purely digital publications? I can see us being entirely digital in
ten years, or maybe five years, but I'm not sure, as a group, we are there
yet. Because the board is uncertain that the membership truly want the
newsletter to become entirely digital, we have been discussing ways to offer
the newsletter as a pdf to those who chose that format, while still having a
paper document for those who want it. Doing so will create more hassles for
the membership chair, who will have to alter and update membership lists and
choices more often.

I was extremely dismayed that Karl Eberth thought that the GBW was
"withholding information that could be posted online shortly after an event
is over or after a certain publication date seems punitive and exclusive."
We really are not trying to restrict anything. Some chapters have a better
or more timely web presence, and some have digital publications which appear
to be easy to put on our webpage. Few of the Journals before the late 1990s
are even available in digital format. Often it is just a case that no
volunteer has the time to put it all out on the website. We are looking for
ways of improving, but every added task takes time, no matter how simple
they may seem, especially to those who are more digitally-savvy than the
rest of us.

Finally, there were also a number of comments about the webpage, almost all
suggesting that it looks old fashioned, and has little content. Everyone
agrees on these points. Most of our web presence dates back to the original
webpage assembled by Peter Verheyen ten years ago. One of the frustrations
of working in a volunteer organization is that anything you want to do takes
a lot more time and energy than you expected, and the reworking of the
webpage is no exception. We are in the process of having it re-designed, and
are already assembling new content, like the index of the Journal, that will
be on the new webpage. All I can tell you is that it is coming. Slowly.

Another good example: Margaret Johnson has a lot of chapter newsletters from
her time as national newsletter editor. She offered them to us for the
archives. Margaret has to ship them to the chapter chairs, who have to go
through their own files to see if they have all of these issues, and then
they have to send them to the archives in Iowa. Then someone has to go
through the archive folders to see what we have, and what we need, and
re-file them. It will be great to have these in the archives, but it is more
work for a number of people, who are already busy with their own jobs and
families and lives.

The journal index is a good example of how vexing these issues can be. Alan
Shalette has been working on it since August, and has it almost complete. He
and I have corresponded at least three or four times per week for more than
six months about various indexing issues, and it is still not complete.
Everything takes time. We are lucky Alan is willing to give his time. Anyone
who would like to volunteer to help out with the webpage, or with GBW
publications, or any of our activities, please contact me. We always have
more good ideas than we have people to carry them out.

Jim



James Reid-Cunningham
Chief Conservator
Boston Athenaeum
10 1/2 Beacon Street
Boston MA 02108
617-720-7617
reid-cunningham@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




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