The Board of Publications met during the ACB midyear meetings in Arlington, VA. Several members participated via teleconference. Members present: Chair Denise Colley, Ron Brooks, Marcia Dresser (via phone), Doug Powell; ex officio members Berl Colley, Bob Hachey (via phone); ACB staff/contractors Sharon Lovering, Annette Carter (via phone). Members absent: Richard Rueda, Ron Milliman, Larry Turnbull. Several guests also participated on the call.
Chair Denise Colley convened the meeting at 7:05 PM EST. Ron moved and Doug seconded approval of the agenda as presented by Denise; the motion carried. Doug moved and Ron seconded approval of the January 6, 2014, minutes; the motion carried. We will approve the February 3 minutes at our April meeting.
IOC Best Practices Document
The Internet Oversight Committee drafted this document, with assistance from Ron Brooks. All affiliates are encouraged to model their list rules according to these guidelines, whether or not they use the ACB domain. Marcia moved and Doug seconded a motion to approve the best practices document once the entire IOC has seen it. If the IOC recommends any change to the document, it will come back to the BOP for consideration. The motion carried.
Editorial Policy Manual
Doug outlined the changes that he, Denise, and Marcia had made to update the editorial policy manual. A long discussion ensued regarding standards for large print. There is concern; we have already cut back the ACB Braille Forum from 56 to 48 pages. Sharon reported that by using the CCLVI standards and the same number of pages, the word count would be reduced from 14,000 to 10,000. We need to do a side-by-side comparison, but Annette has not been able to do this because the hard copy large print magazine is printed in two columns, and the margins on the MS Word document are wider than the margins in the magazine. We determined that the position of the BOP is that just as we adhere to the BANA guidelines to produce braille, we should cite the CCLVI best practices as our standard for large print, and that we will implement it to the extent practicable. We will incorporate this into the budget we submit each year, and then it is up to the board of directors to decide how to proceed. Doug suggested that a research committee be formed of people from the BOP, the board of directors, and CCLVI to determine the best large print format to get the most amount of words into the fewest number of pages with the best amount of readability. The CCLVI best practices document will be appended as an attachment to the editorial policy manual. Ron moved and Doug seconded that the intent of the BOP is to adopt as the standard for large print the standards set forth in the CCLVI best practices document, which will be attached and incorporated into this editorial policy manual as a reference. The motion carried. The BOP sets policy regarding the convention newspaper, but the convention committee sets the prices for ads, so we will delete the reference to pricing from the policy manual. Ron moved and Marcia seconded to adopt the changes to the editorial policy manual discussed in this meeting, subject to final revision. The motion carried.
Survey
Denise summarized how the ACB E-Forum came about and that now, as a result, some people feel that we are denying them access to this information because the E-Forum is an electronic document which they are unable to access. It is, however, available on NFB Newsline and on many radio reading services across the country, and it will soon be available on ACB's new Audio Now system. At a previous meeting, the BOP decided that we would survey the membership to find out what they want in the publications and how they want to have access to them. We want everyone to take the survey, so it will be on the ACB Web site, we will help people complete the survey (by telephone or at the convention), and we will ask affiliates to spread the word and to help in assisting their members with the survey as needed. Concern was expressed about asking for economic status as one of the demographic questions, but there is a "choose not to disclose" option. We discussed the survey questions and the work plan that Ron put together. The goal is to finalize the survey questions by the end of February, to post and distribute the survey at the beginning of April, to have a "town hall" meeting at the convention to discuss the survey, and to have all the surveys submitted by the end of July. Hopefully the data will be analyzed in time for the October BOP meeting, so that the data can be used in developing the BOP budget for 2015. Doug pointed out that we need to choose the data analyst soon because they need to sign off on the questions. We will put the survey on Survey Monkey or on the ACB site; according to Annette, Drupal has tools to provide analytics. Hard copy entries will be sent to Denise, who will enter the data into the online survey. We will sign a confidentiality pledge. We have a budget of $1,500 for the survey.
The next meeting of the board of publications will take place on Monday, April 7, at 9:00 PM EDT via teleconference.
The meeting adjourned at 9:25 PM EST.
Respectfully submitted,
Marcia N. Dresser, Secretary
This web page was last updated June 2, 2014.