AQUA AGM - Electronic version of Quaternary Australasia

[Arthur Clarke]

Hi folks:

Although inactive as an AQUA member (or contributor/ attendee at AQUA
meetings), I have been an AQUA member for some time and still read most
editions of "Quaternary Australasia" from cover to cover and just wanted to
put my "two bob" into the discussion about the possibility of it being
produced / circulated in an electronic format.

Echoing the comments by your retiring (??) president - Paul Hesse - I would
like to suggest that QA remains as it is in hardcopy format.   Having been
involved with other (speleological) journals that have or have had an
electronic option, I am sceptical about the viability of an electronic copy
being readily accepted, readable and accessable in the same way that a hard
copy can be easily accessed or referenced from your bookshelf or magazine
holder.   (I wonder what the motivation for this suggestion is.... lets face
it, we have long given up on the ideal that computers were going to save us
paper and save our forests from being pulped!!)

However, having said that there are two suggestions I would like to offer
which although not on your AGM agenda, these might be possibly considered as
other related items of general business.

1: Provided that copyright acknowledgment and intellectual property concerns
are covered, that AQUA possibly consider establishing an electronic form of
an indexed archive of past issues - available from a website or as a CD ROM.
This will probably entail scanning of the earlier editions with appropriate
OCR software to produce an accurate and readable electronic format.

2: Instead of the above (or in addition), that AQUA consider compiling an
Index edition of QA - perhaps every 5 or 10 years, that indexes issues by
volume number and content, title of article including book/ journal reviews,
subject matter or Quaternary discipline (or whatever the topic/s are covered
in body text of article), author / contributor (and contact address) and
perhaps also the relevant region/ locality covered by subject matter.

3: That the editor of QA might also consider regularly publishing a synopsis
of contributions forwarded to this AQUA Mailing List relating to for example
the clay vibracorer (edited to omit irrevelant or unsavoury contributions).
I suspect that some of these topics would have wider interest to the the
AQUA membership, other than just those on the AQUA List.   (I assume there
are quite a few AQUA members who are either without internet/ email access
or who are not subscribers, apart from those AQUA List subscribers who don't
read the List contributions.)

Cheers,
Arthur Clarke.