Well, this new venture of ours has made it to Issue no.3: our one-year anniversary. Overall I have been pleased, both with the work submitted by our authors and by the response from our readers. With this issue we will have published thirteen articles. The journal has not developed as I had initially hoped, more on that below, but it seems to be having an impact within the profession. The first two issues have had just under 3,000 page views each, and we have 76 followers. Not the 6,000-issue circulation of American Archivist, but quite respectable, especially for a new journal.
One of things we had hoped for when we started this journal is to provide a forum for sharing how we do things when we process collections. To me this has always included how we physically do things. We had hoped for articles and tips on physical processing as well as the electronic side of things. So far we haven’t gotten any submissions like that. Given the increasingly important role electronics are playing in our lives this is not surprising. More and more we describe and publish our descriptions electronically. Still we do have to physically process most of our collections and I would like to hear about that.
We also set the journal up so that we could publish instructional videos and other multimedia submissions. With the popularity of YouTube it seemed that it might be a popular option. So far it has not been. All our submissions to date have been text.
We had also hoped that some of the articles we published would spark a conversation about the topic covered. For that purpose we left the comments function open on the articles. What we got instead has been two legitimate comments and thousands of pieces of spam. I regret to say that we have turned the comments off.
Although not necessarily the journal we envisioned, what we have is another excellent issue with five strong articles that we hope you will find useful. We also hope that submissions will keep coming in. You need not wait for the official call for papers, feel free to submit any time.
Happy Archiving,
Randall Miles
Managing Editor
Practical Technology for Archives 