JURP
Goes online...the end of paper production evolution (continued
from main page)
The subscription list consisted of about 200 libraries and various individual
subscriptions. The subscription list was kept on the same computer that
produced the copy. Individual address labels were printed, and with
the help of the editor's wife, were placed on the individual copies,
each copy was sealed with tape, and then taken to the bulk mail area
of the college's mail room. A large mailing consisted of about 700 copies.
As the
editor also a professor of physics in a small liberal arts college,
he received support from the college in the production of the journal.
The college handled all of the financial record keeping and provided
some of the costs of maintaining the editorial office a Guilford.
This meant that the editor had to learn something about accounting,
so that he could figure out how to read the balance sheets, etc. It
became clear to him that accountants have a language and mathematics
all of their own.
The editorial
office moved with the editor as he went on sabbatical. Early on, one
volume was produced on an old all-in-one MacIntosh computer in the
city of Starnberg, Germany. The editor would format the copy while
overlooking the alps and the Starnberger See. A Guilford, physics
student, Dail Rowe, acted as business manager and handled the mail
correspondence that came from Germany and all other things. A second
time, the copy was edited and produced in the town of Kula on the
slopes of Haleakala overlooking the paradise known as Maui. Again
a Guilford physics student, Ari Betof, acted as business manager and
ran the office at Guiford College. This time, communications were
easy as the internet was available and very fast.
In 1987,
the Society of Physics Students decided to send all members of the
society a printed copy of the Journal. The production runs went from
a few hundred to a maximum of 8 thousand. The mailing lists could
no longer be kept at Journal office at Guilford College and labels
printed. A bulk mailing service was used to send out the copies. Still
another new skill had to be learned.
Then,
yet another learning opportunity occurred; the old word processor
that the editor finally mastered, was no longer supported. He had
to start looking at other software systems to produce the copy. After
many frustrating attempts to use WORD and WordPerfect to format the
Journal, the decision was made to adopt PageMaker as the word processor.
There were a couple of interesting consequences of the adoption of
this word processor. First, and perhaps the most important at the
time, was that the copy could be sent electronically to the printer.
There no longer was a need to produce a hard copy that had photographed
so that the journal could be printed using the off-set method.
The second
is that it became possible to easily produce a copy of the Journal
in pdf format. This made it possible to place old copies of the Journal
in pdf format on a web page. The web page of the Journal is maintained
by the American Institute of Physics and can be found at: http://www.JURP.org
At this
time, the journal is no longer sent to each member of the Society
of Physics Students. The current issue is still produced in a hard
copy format that is sent to libraries and those individuals who subscribe
to it.
The production
of JURP is a mirror of the upgrading of a physicist, from an experimentalist
who interfaced computers into nuclear counting experiments to a semi-skilled
desktop publisher. Now that the editor of JURP is approaching his
dotage and retirement as a teacher, he is also looking forward to
gaining a few hundred hours per year when someone else takes over
JURP and moves it to the next level.
