MAGIRT Publications Committee
Meeting Minutes July 2011 through January 2012
The Publications Committee met twice between the Annual Conference and Midwinter, and also a smaller Task Force met once.
August 17th minutes, conference call
Present Steve Rogers, Roger Knouff, Chris Kollen, Kathleen Weessies, John Olson, John Phillips, Jim Coombs
- Converting the website from MAGERT to MAGIRT: Scheduled to happen this fall. Extensive changes to the website are inadvisable between now and then, but we do want to update the information on the website about how to purchase our books
- Publishing Electronic Publication #10. Kathy Weimer would like to submit her history of MAGERT article to be published as an Electronic Publication, rather than as the final article in Coordinates. Kathy needs to make some edits and will submit it when it is ready.
- Task Force for assessing publications: The Board has asked the Publications Committee to form a task force to discuss and report any recommendations on restructuring MAGIRT publications. The task force will be Kathleen, Steve, John Olson, and John Phillips. We did discuss a bit various ideas about expanding base line to include some scholarly content, or to consider special issues with guest editors.
- Selling at the ALA Store: We must fill out some confusing forms to sell items at the ALA Store. Fees require us to raise the price considerably on the Great Moments book. We were losing money on each copy at $25 even when selling it from Jim’s office. So we recently raised the price to $30. To sell it online we will need to raise the price to probably $35.
Publications Task Force Minutes, October, conference call
Present Kathleen, John Olson, John Phillips
- The task force developed no recommendation on fundamental changes to base line, such as adding scholarly content. The issue of lack of editorial oversight is the main constraint.
- The task force did also discuss developing a procedure for receiving and processing drafts of Electronic Publications. This will be developed further. Kathleen will check MAGIRT bylaws to see if that affects our procedures.
January meeting (January 18, 4pm EST) Skype
Present: Colleen Cahill, Chris Kollen, Kathleen Weessies, Steve Rogers, John Olson, John Phillips. Jim C. could hear but couldn’t speak.
- Base line report (Steve Rogers): The last two issues have come out (October and December). There was a small issue with the comic, but with the electronic format, it is easy to overwrite the mistake to fix it. We are still lacking an Electronic Maps Editor. Generally this person contributes to issues (not necessarily all issues) with whatever they find interesting in the world of electronic maps and geospatial data. This column can be whatever we want to make of it. The Publications Committee is open to proposals and ideas from the membership.
- Website report (Colleen Cahill):
o Our uploaded documents should be handicap compliant (an ALA initiative and an all-around good idea). Colleen is not able to do this as she doesn’t have the software to convert Adobe Acrobat files. The Publications Committee will require authors to submit any future Acrobat documents already converted. There is a wizard within Adobe Acrobat Professional. Perhaps the committee should issue guidelines or instructions on how to do this. Steve volunteered to convert some of the older ‘Electronic Publications’ currently on the website.
o ALA wants to move our MAGIRT ‘roster’ information into a new style webpage to be a ‘committee’ style page. This will effectively suppress the contact information of the people listed, unless the website user is an ALA member and logs in with their ALA membership information. Kathleen expressed concern about potential non-members or potential advertisers having trouble reaching us without any contact information. An idea was floated to create generic email addresses that would forward to the appropriate people. Colleen will get more information and will report back.