I just read on the Pa list serve that's just awful! From their website:


******Due to a staffing shortfall, Cape May Bird Observatory's Center for Research and Education on Route 47 north of Goshen will be closed to the public effective April 11, 2009. The grounds and gardens will remain open to the public. CMBO's Northwood Center on East Lake Drive in Cape May Point is open daily, 9:30am to 4:30pm

I love that place how sad!

sarah merion station, Pennsylvania zone 6B

Apparently two members of the staff resigned with just two weeks notice. No one I have talked to seems to know whether or not this is short-term. Their once remarkable gardens have been neglected for the past few years due to lack of commitment and the loss of the person who was the driving force behind them. The organization has been cost cutting lately. Particularly egregious to many of us who were active in the organization was the decision to no longer publish New Jersey Birds as a magazine. It is now just one line. Several editors resigned over that decision including my successor and in the case of my old region no editor has been found.

I haven't visited the facility in question (though of course I know of Cape May's reputation in the birding community as one of the most important spots for observing migrants). Hopefully, if the issue is simply that they lack sufficient staff due to resignations, replacement of the staff eventually will allow the center to re-open. My concern is whether the staff in question resigned due to budget cuts - i.e. were salaries cut below a level the staff could live with - or if the positions were low-paid and the staffers had to seek higher-paid full-time work to help support a family. I suspect we'll see more of that sort of thing in this economy since so many places rely on volunteers and low-paid (NOT low-skill) employees who are doing this sort of work because they love it.

That said, even as someone who loves to soak in the tub with a good magazine or book or a newspaper, I can understand the decision to move publication of a journal to an online-only edition. The cost of printed works continues to skyrocket (in my experience, paper costs have risen by about 80% over the last four years). All too often, the cost of printing grossly exceeds the income for journals - subscriptions just don't cut it any more, and there's not much advertising demand in a journal.

The most important thing, in my opinion, is the collection of the information into a central, accessible place. If a printed magazine is an option that an organization can afford, great - I'm all for that. Some well-endowed institutions can afford to produce nice, glossy, slick-paper four-color publications. But if they can't - certainly an online journal is better than having nothing. It's one thing to resign in protest on an editorial principle, but to refuse assistance on the grounds that the result isn't in paper form seems to me to be cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.

Kevin Morgan
Baton Rouge, LA

I didn't know the particular couple that is leaving. But I have been intimate with New Jersey Audubon for years, some former staff are among my best friends - life long friends. The pay is not great and the demands are overwhelming. There are no 40 hours weeks among the dedicated staff. If they aren't working 9 to 5 they are leading weekend fieldtrips, or giving programs. It will eat you up.

You are right that the most important thing is the preservation of bird records from the unusual to population monitoring in all its forms. Where I might differ with you is in the matter of paper and for a couple of reasons.

The first is the preservation of the information and its accessability for the long and longer term. Paper copies of Records of New Jersey Birds entered lots of libraries both public and those associated with conservation organizations. They were catalogued and findable. I'm extra sensitive to this issue because of my long service as a regional editor. Back then how I longed for decent information about the past. Beyond a certain point all there was was 19th Century NJ State Museum books and then things went virtually dark. That was something that should never happen again - the dark.

And then there is the question of close reading and the internet. I can't. Some publications need to be at close hand, findable in popular locations like the bathroom. The old records that I knew not only had species and numbers but an editor who attempted to put it all in context. Older birders could review the flavor of the season, it was the publication of record. For younger birders it was amazing teaching tool. Through it they could begin to see the pattern of things. A lot of us came up that way in New Jersey. Records helped us be initiated into the birding community at large and find our places there. That is the way I think it works best. Friendship and mentoring were a natural result of the whole process, most of the best bird naturists came out of that university.

Excuse me for going on but as you can see the conduct of the naturalist culture is very important to me. It is important to a lot of us aging naturalists and we're concerned about the future.

Ward,

I don't disagree that paper is preferable. I like reading paper stuff myself. As I say, one of my favorite places to read is during a long soak in a hot bath - and when an article or books is really good, I've been known to let out some water as it cools and add more hot - just to stay put and keep reading.

But where I disagree is on the question of what to do when paper becomes, in a particular application, impossible to afford. I don't know why paper costs have been skyrocketing in the last decade (something I could probably research, but would likely find conflicting opinion as to what's causing the rise - increased demand for wood products, tighter environmental controls, whatever), but it's a reality.

And as those costs rise, it's a reasonable question to ask: What is the best use of limited subsidy funds (that is, to pay for things which are not self-supporting)? Should we increase spending on a printed journal, to maintain its print format? Particularly at a time when revenues may be falling, due to both investment losses for endowments and decreased donations, that's a tough call to make. Particularly if maintaining a printed presence means raiding reserves - or, perhaps, not having enough ready capital to move quickly on land preservation opportunities that come up.

Assuming the online edition is produced in an easily printable format (such as a PDF), nothing prohibits the individual from making his own copy to read, away from the computer. If the online format isn't easily printable, then shame on the designers who sacrificed this function; every electronic device in the world today has a printable PDF manual available for download, including updates not available at the time of manufacture.

In fact, if anything, I'd prefer to see limited funds be used to digitize back copies of journals - making sure they're preserved for future generations. Enormous numbers of early 20th-century publications are going to start falling apart (many already are) because so many books, magazines, journals and newspapers were printed on cheap paper made from wood pulp that wasn't acid-free. If we don't move now to preserve those, it'll be a loss for information on the scale that the loss of virgin southern bottomland hardwood forest in the 1920's-1940's was for the environment. You mention how, as a regional editor, you longed for information about the past. Imagine going to a library and finding that such information did in fact exist - but it was no longer accessible because the pages of the paper had deteriorated into crumbs.

And you're completely on-target about the effect of mentoring, of long-time birders helping new ones. Certainly, face-to-face interaction is better at that than any online forum, even one such as this. But in the old system, you had to know the system was there, and work your way into it, before you could benefit and before the system benefited from your input. Online, anyone who has an interest in birds can far more easily find, and tap into, the local and regional birding community, from home. I think of how many people over the last 10 or so years have done just that from forums such as this, from listservs dedicated to birding, and so forth. What I see is that the internet helps break down the barriers to entering that community, and I hope that it encourages people to share even more, online and offline both.

Widespread access to publications via libraries, of course, is a great thing. But in one sense, the internet is the biggest library on the planet. Making the journals available online, not just to the scores of New Jersey libraries which got them originally, but to the tens of thousands of libraries around the world, seems to me to even better ensure their preservation--assuming, of course, proper backup and redundancy of the information. I know there's concern about changing media standards over the years - tape reels, tape cartridges, multiple sizes of floppy disks, ZIP disks, etc. - but the reality is, the fundamentals of hard disk storage have remained remarkably constant, and as newer hard drive technologies arrive, systems generally support older standards for long enough to transfer archival data over. To me, THAT's ensuring that information remains available for future generations.

So when money gets tight, I'm for continuing to produce the information, online-only, rather than quitting in protest. I just can't see how the latter helps preserve records in any way. (And I realize, Ward, that it was your successor who quit, not you.)