June 26, 1998
Oakland, California
Dear Comrades,
At a three-day meeting last weekend, the Northern California Bay Area-based steering committee of the internationalist effort to put some 350 Pathfinder publications into electronic format voted to take on a goal of dramatically increasing our output in order to produce 10 Pathfinder titles a month. Included in this decision is, beginning with some pilot projects, taking responsibility for volunteer production of the entire book - including photo signatures, illustrations, and book covers. Accomplishing this goal will take a disciplined effort by every Pathfinder volunteer in cities around the globe.
Comrades know from reading the Militant that The Revolution Betrayed was recently the first Pathfinder title produced with computer-to-plate technology, with the digitizing of the text - from scanning to proofreading to formatting - being done entirely by volunteers; many of you were involved in that process.
We decided to fight to get two more titles printed by the time of the July 11-12 Active Workers Conference in Pittsburgh: Sexism and Science, and Rosa Luxemburg Speaks. In the past few days, many volunteers have received urgent phone calls and e-mail asking for your help in meeting this challenging goal.
We also voted on a goal for the rest of 1998 that includes producing 34 books, 17 pamphlets, 5 Education for Socialists, and 3 New Internationals - a total of 59 publications in a little more than five months. And we want each of these titles to adhere to Pathfinder's high standards of quality - which the new printing of The Revolution Betrayed certainly does. We also have a functioning web site where volunteers can get important political and technical materials like key Militant articles on this effort, the proofreading guidelines, scanning and massage instructions, and templates for formatting. The web site address is: http://www.pfvolcenter.com
... Currently, more than 130 people have volunteered to help do the scanning, proofreading, formatting, cover design and digitizing, and graphics digitizing involved in each volume....
The report by Mary-Alice Waters ["Transforming Pathfinder book production as we respond to growing workers' resistance," given at an international socialist conference in Toronto, Ontario, and printed in the June 1 Militant] along with the ad for the Active Workers Conference in the June 22, 1998, Militant, give a good indication of the main lines of what we discussed at our meeting: the relationship between the reorganization of labor in the party print shop and the international volunteer brigade digitizing Pathfinder books, and the importance to the communist movement of the increased leverage provided by friends of the party who want to help. The decision to reduce the size of the party's print shop through installing the most advanced printing technology can only work if our steering committee is able to organize all the volunteers to provide Pathfinder with a steady supply of high-quality digital files, which are complete and ready to print, from cover to index, from photos to table of contents.
The only way to accomplish the necessarily much-increased pace and scope of book production is by organizing every volunteer, in a much more timely and effective manner. Many frustrated volunteers have been waiting quite a while for some work to be sent to them; we want to solve that problem immediately. In addition, we often send out work with no guidance as to how quickly we need it back. We also realized that many volunteers with skills in certain areas like design and formatting - which we are weakest in right now - are not being properly utilized.
Call to Action
We need volunteers now for the following tasks:
1. Joining our new design/cover digitization team. For this, we are especially interested in those comrades who have skills in using the programs Adobe Photoshop, Quark Express, and Adobe Illustrator, as well as those who have design experience. This team will be responsible for designing templates for each publication; redesigning covers, where necessary; and helping to figure out the best way to digitize or reconstruct covers we already have for which there are no electronic files yet.
2. Joining our new graphics digitization team. For this, we think it will be useful to have volunteers with some knowledge and appreciation of photography. This department will be responsible for digitizing, with the best possible quality, the photos, drawings, and other black-and-white artwork for each Pathfinder title.
3. We need more volunteers to join our formatting team. A knowledge of Microsoft Word is especially useful for this work, as well as some experience in desktop publishing. This department is responsible for taking the proofread and corrected digital files of the text - and soon, the graphics and covers - and using the templates provided by the design department to put the book into shape to be printed by Pathfinder. These comrades also produce a new index for each book and organize teams of volunteers to double check each book before it is sent to the shop for computer-to-plate printing.
4. We could also use more people who have scanners and knowledge of scanning, massaging, and OCR. We have found that the care with which the text is initially scanned and massaged has a huge impact on the subsequent phases of production, especially proofreading....
This perspective is challenging and exciting. The key to successfully carrying it out, however, is our ability to organize the scores of volunteers who want to enlist in this project, and be part of this international joint effort with Pathfinder's print shop.
To volunteer or to re-volunteer, you can contact me at: rcheney3@compuserve.com
Comradely,
Ruth Cheney,
Pathfinder Volunteer
Steering Committee Organizer