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RE : DRAFT recommendations v1.2

Dear Syd
I have not joined in the recent discussion lately because I am away on holiday and this internet connection is too slow to write too much. I have to agree with John Helliwell about the need to keep open the possibility of paper (could this be a generation thing in which old farts find reading directly from a screen difficult?). regarding the tabular presentation I managed to take a look at the Knovel tables and these are quite impressive. I think that something like this would be very useful to implement: the sort of data we are interested in in crystallography is ideally suited to such presentation. It would be nice to have for example a table of elements from wghich one cqn derive all the atom specific data e.g/ absorption.
Mike Glazer

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-------- Message d'origine--------
De: john richard helliwell [mailto:[email protected]]
Date: mer. 27/07/2005 09:50
�: Howard Flack; Sydney Hall
Cc: [email protected]; Ulrich Mueller; Mois Aroyo; John R.Helliwell; Helen Berman; Nicola Ashcroft; Michael Glazer; Howard Einspahr; Brian McMahon
Objet : Re: DRAFT recommendations v1.2
 
Dear Syd,
I acknowledge safe receipt of your draft recommendations and Howard's elaborations.
 
Whilst I agree obviously with International Tables being online as essential, and urgently needed, I find myself struggling to agree with the implications of the 'unanimous view....that use of print-on-paper will rapidly decline in the next decade.' 
 
specifically this begs the question ;- decline to zero? 
 
The suggestion I offer then is that perhaps short print versions should be allowed for in IUCr's planning of the various IT titles along the lines of the teaching edition of Volume A. This would retain flexibility and allow the non-tabular data type of content to be printed (but with examples of tabular data still included) eg in the way that Howard has suggested ie according to demand. 
 
Flexibility of approach is required I believe because I think there is a very significant risk in the recommendations of assuming that the paperless office will be 95% of researchers' behaviours in a very short timescale. I may be old fashioned but my office is definitely not paperless yet [and with not much sign of abatement either]. Rather the experience I have is a wider range of information availablities but where paper is definitely still very much an option one uses. 
 
Greetings to all,
John
 


Howard Flack <[email protected]> wrote:
> though 1(c)
> may be seen as a bit too prescriptive.


Instead how about:

The maintenance of print-on-paper volumes of IT is a matter of market
demand. A switch from bulk lithograph printing to digital printing to
print-on-demand will enable smaller numbers of volumes to be printed and
warehoused, but with an increased unit production cost and selling
price. Timely decisions will need to made on this matter.


John R Helliwell
Professor of Structural Chemistry, The University of Manchester;
Joint Appointee with CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory;
Editor-in-Chief Acta Crystallographica published by IUCr.
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