President's Message
March/April 2008
(as published in Arch Notes New Series 13(2))
Once again, at least where I live, talk of global warming took a bit of a back seat to the reality that seemed to be accumulating in record volumes on my roof and in my driveway. I have lived in Aylmer, Québec since 1990 and I have never seen as much snow as this. The worst part is that my father's old snow blower sat idle in my shed behind the house because I just didn't think it would get that bad. The lessons here are many. For one, truly significant global weather patterns cannot be easily extrapolated from a single season in a single area, or even over the course of a single human lifespan. Many data points over a long time are necessary before suggesting a meaningful pattern, let alone predicting the future. This simply brings us back to a similar point I talked about on this page last year at about this same time, namely: that the past has much to teach us about human behaviour as well as the dynamic world in which people lived. In today's discussions of the effects of greenhouse gases on the environment, to what point are we factoring long-term climate patterns into the debate? It was difficult enough to convince a majority that there is such a phenomenon as a greenhouse effect. What kind of cynicism would greet additional considerations such as Greenland Ice core and pollen data spanning millennia?
At a small and personal scale, this winter I exercised my myopic option and ended up breaking my back because I kept telling myself that this snowfall would likely be the last big one of the season (truth be known, I was in Toronto for one of the worst of the snowfalls and my wife and daughter were stuck, literally, with the snow). Next year, I will tune up the old snow blower in the fall and take it out at the first flurry!
A significant number of you have chosen to receive Arch Notes electronically. The first electronic issue was sent out for January-February and received very good reviews. Several of you wrote emails expressing your appreciation of the colour version and some asked to receive the electronic version from now on instead of paper copies. This represents a very important milestone for the OAS in terms of publishing electronically. We feel the number of people receiving Arch Notes via e-mail will only grow, and it will soon become the norm.
As more of you receive your copies of Arch Notes by e-mail, some will see this as a loss. In some ways, we will be parting company with a tradition that has served the OAS well.On the other hand, there is nothing wrong with establishing new traditions and setting out on new courses that hold much promise. There is a new generation of OAS members who require the OAS to be pertinent to their world. At the same time rest assured that the OAS will strive to be mindful of those who brought us to this point as well.
The OAS is no stranger to electronic publishing. In fact, the Ottawa Chapter of the OAS published a proceedings volume of articles stemming from the 1996 annual OAS symposium which the Ottawa Chapter organized in Kingston. At that time, 11 authors decided to submit their reworked papers for publication. Those articles, published as individual PDF files along with an introduction and the summary of a forum discussion on the future of archaeology in Ontario, were first posted in 1997. Since at least 2002, the files have been housed on the servers of the National Library of Canada, now Library and Archives Canada. Monthly download statistics are produced and tell a very interesting story about the usage that these articles are being put to. From August of 2002 until March of 2008 (data are missing for 7 months over this entire time period), 18,053 downloads were made from the Library and Archives Canada site. Assuming that each article was downloaded as frequently as the next, if these 13 articles were bound together in a single book, these downloads would represent nearly 1,390 books!
The OAS's second venture into electronic publishing came in 2000 when the Canadian Archaeological Association held its annual conference in Ottawa. This time, to mark the 50th anniversary of the OAS, a joint electronic proceedings volume was published under the twin banners of the OAS and the CAA. In this case, there were 26 papers submitted as articles along with a foreword, a table of contents and a cover. The total number of downloads for the same period (similarly with 7 months lacking data) is 107,066. This collection has been posted since the fall of 2001. Once again, if we assume an equal number of downloads for each article, the total number of books represented by the downloads is more than 3,700!
If you examine the plots of monthly download statistics for these two publications (shown below), it is clear that initially there was a great interest in these articles, for a period lasting nearly 3 years. While the number of monthly downloads have dropped significantly, they now appear to have reached a plateau over the past year or so, and while those stabilized numbers are much more modest, they are nonetheless constant. One thing is certain, we do not have boxes of unsold books to store, nor continuing mailing costs to absorb, let alone the vagaries and uncertainties of receiving and filling orders.
As these articles are all available at no cost, save those incurred for an Internet connection, some would argue that giving these publications away has represented a very significant loss of revenue for the OAS. On the other hand, I would argue that collectively we have furthered the goals of the OAS in a way that selling the books would never have allowed.Without any doubt, we have been read by people who would never have purchased the books if they had been available in print form only. Moreover, people have downloaded these articles from parts of the world that hardly know anything about Canada's past, let alone Ontario's.
Library and Archives Canada has the mandate to make these electronic publications available in perpetuity and will ensure that the files are not left behind as a result of technological change. These electronic publications will not become rare books. In principle they will always be accessible to all. Now isn't that what societies such as the OAS exist to do: to help preserve the record of Ontario's past and create an awareness and appreciation of it?
Jean-Luc Pilon
The two OAS e-publications:
A Collection of Papers Presented at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Archaeological Association, edited by Jean-Luc Pilon, Michael Kirby and Caroline Thériault, 2000. click here
Home is Where the Hearth Is. The contribution of small sites to our understanding of Ontario's past, edited by Jean-Luc Pilon and Rachel Perkins, 1996. click here