BPG Publications Committee Winter Meeting Report – March 17, 2006
Shannon Zachary, Interim Chair
The BPG Publications Committee midwinter meeting met March 17, 2006. The Publications Committee mission and policy statement are available online at http://aic.stanford.edu/sg/bpg/pubc/mission.html. Shannon Zachary is serving as interim chair of the Committee until a new permanent chair is identified.
The Committee confirmed commitment to the three core BPG publications that are currently active: the BPG Annual, the Paper Conservation Catalog, and the Book Conservation Catalog. Discussion at the meeting focused on how to maintain and move forward these major undertakings with their high dependence on the volunteer efforts of busy professionals. The Committee agreed to seek approval of the membership at the BPG business meeting in Providence for extra financial support for production costs for the Annual. The Committee also agreed that a portion of the budget line representing past sales of the Paper Conservation Catalog and reserved for support of the PCC may be spent on production costs to prepare and mount the PCC on the website.
The Committee's goals this year include mounting the entire existing PCC online as well as mounting the first parts of the Book Conservation Catalog. The Book Conservation Catalog is being developed as a web-based publication and will appear incrementally as chapters or portions of chapters are prepared. The online publication of volumes 20–23 of the Annual is in process. The Committee is also looking at ways to reduce inventory of back copies of the Annual because of reduced availability of storage.
We wish to thank Rebecca Rushfield and Penley Knipe who have volunteered to subject index retrospective volumes of the BPG Annual. The online version of the BPG Annual is currently searchable by means of a full-text search engine. Walter Henry is adding key words to allow more specialist-centered subject access to the Annual content. This project was started by Rachel Benbow in 2001 and Rebecca and Penley are indexing the remaining articles.