Members present: chair Denise Colley, Ron Brooks, Marcia Dresser, Judy Jackson, Doug Powell; ex officio members Berl Colley, Bob Hachey, Ron Milliman; ACB staff/contractors Annette Carter, Sharon Lovering. Several guests also participated on the call.
Denise convened the meeting at 9:05 PM EDT. The meeting agenda was adopted as distributed, and the August minutes were approved with two corrections.
Editor's Report
Today was Sharon's first day back at the ACB office following an illness; she is working on making the CD copies and getting the ACB Braille Forum mailed out. Sharon will explain to Denise all of the steps and time frames employed in getting the Forum out. Denise suggested creating a document which would list all of these steps in detail. Denise will contact NLS director Karen Keninger about when we can make the Forum available on the BARD site. Doug moved and Marcia seconded approval of Sharon's report; the motion carried.
Public Relations Committee
The committee met on August 18. They decided to distribute their marketing tips every other week instead of every week. Several affiliates have reported that these recommendations are very helpful. The committee will continue its quarterly open conference calls; the next one will focus on using Facebook and Twitter together to bring traffic to an affiliate's Web site.
Oral History Project
Berl has five interviews lined up and is investigating how to record them, since he cannot do it on his home phone.
Leadership Institute
The committee, comprised of Berl, Doug, Ray Campbell, Carla Ruschival, Jim Jirak, and Ardis Bazyn, met in August and is drafting an agenda for next summer's Leadership Training Institute, which will take place on July 11 in Las Vegas, with a similar setup to the one in Louisville. Berl will make sure that the Leadership Institute is considered a convention event included on the pre-registration form. Carla Ruschival said that the Institute will be receiving a sponsorship, probably at the level of $2,500. Ron Brooks suggested looking into obtaining a grant; Berl will put this on the agenda for the next call on October 14.
Internet Oversight Committee
Bob reported that ACB-l is now a friendlier list. Each person can post up to ten messages per day. The committee will meet in a few weeks, and they will draft a set of best practices for list administration.
Marcia moved and Ron Brooks seconded acceptance of the committee reports; the motion carried.
Web Site Report
Annette continues to improve the functionality of the new site. There will be separate phone sessions for totally blind and low vision folks to review the site before it is officially launched, and Annette offered the BOP members the chance to be included. When the site is ready for the walk-through, Annette will inform Denise, and we'll select a time to do this.
Social Networking
The Twitter team is in place, comprised of Michael Malver, Jim Denham, and Lisa Brooks, with John McCann as board liaison. They are doing an excellent job. An announcement is being circulated to recruit three people for the Facebook team. There are currently 185 "likes" on the Facebook page. Several convention photos are posted there. The Goal One team will next meet on Monday, September 16.
Jennco Contract
We decided that the three narrators of the ACB E-Forum will be Judy Jackson, Marcia Dresser, and Paul Edwards.
On August 22, the five BOP members met in executive session with Steve Dresser, president of Jennco Productions. Steve outlined the extra work involved with producing the E-Forum in NLS format, which will result in increased expenditures. Producing brf files is turning out to be more work and take more time than initially expected. The bigger issue, however, is the amount of work involved in editing the files once they are read. When three people read the E-Forum, the files must be edited and normalized so that they have the same sound quality and level. We will have to consider a new process when the next bid is done, because Jennco's original bid was predicated on taking the files that were already done and doing the markup. After a lengthy discussion, we decided that because we have a contract with Jennco Productions, we need to find out what our budget is, how much has been spent, and how much we have left. Denise is trying to get a line by line breakout of our budget.
ACB treasurer Carla Ruschival gave us a great deal of valuable information regarding the budget process. Our long discussion resulted in the determination that we cannot make a decision about the Jennco Productions contract until we procure additional budget information from Lane Waters. Ron moved and several seconded a motion that when Denise gets the budget information, Denise, Ron, and Paul Edwards will work on a recommendation that will be submitted to Melanie Brunson for input, after which she will do the negotiating. The motion carried. Each month, Sharon will report how many issues of each format of the Forum are sent out. Ron and Denise will develop a spreadsheet to use for this.
Bopeep
Ken Stewart heard from another ACB member that the large print issue of the Forum is harder to read than previous issues. The CDs will be duplicated and shipped out on September 10, and the cassette and braille editions should be shipped out the week of September 16.
Unfinished Business
As discussed last month, the past ACB presidents and their dates of service will appear in the November Forum.
The meeting adjourned at 11:10 PM EDT.
The next meeting of the Board of Publications will take place via teleconference on Monday, October 7, at 9:00 PM EDT.
Respectfully submitted,
Marcia N. Dresser, Secretary