July 8, 2012 Board of Publications Meeting Minutes

The Board of Publications met in person at the ACB national convention in Louisville, KY, on Sunday July 8. Members present: Chairperson Paul Edwards, Nolan Crabb, Marcia Dresser, Judy Jackson, Ken Stewart; ex officio member Berl Colley; staff member Sharon Lovering. Many convention attendees also participated. Members absent: ex officio members Bob Hachey and Ron Milliman; staff/contractors Annette Carter and Larry Turnbull.
 
Chair Paul Edwards called the meeting to order at 10:48 AM EDT. The minutes of the May 7 meeting were approved as distributed.
 
Nolan Crabb, chair of the Web site task force, presented his report. He said that changes are being made to the ACB Web site so that access for folks with low vision is greatly improving. Nolan wants to involve the staff in putting up Web pages in their areas of responsibility. He explained that with Drupal, it is possible to make templates for the way information is disseminated on the site, which will allow for a wide range of alteration and better accessibility. HTML must be transferred to frames that work in Drupal. In closing, Nolan stated that someone should be able to link to any affiliate by going to acb.org/ followed by the name of the affiliate. He will talk to Annette about this. The task force will meet again in August. Someone from the audience stated that the ACB resolutions from 2011, the 2011 revision of the policy manual, and the revised copyright statement have not yet been posted on the site. The BOP will check into this.
 
In response to a question from the audience, Paul stated that the BOP makes policy decisions but does not dictate what is published or ACB radio content. In response to another question, Paul stated that Judy Jackson is the BOP liaison to the public relations committee.
 
The rest of the meeting was devoted to a "forum on the Forum." We discussed the ramifications of the proposed name change of "The Braille Forum" to "The ACB Forum". Also, we received several excellent suggestions regarding content of the magazine. The meeting adjourned at noon EDT.
 
The next BOP meeting will take place via teleconference on Monday, August 6 at 9:00 PM EDT.
 
Respectfully submitted,
Marcia N. Dresser, Secretary