Transforming the APLA Bulletin

 submitted by Ian Gibson

The Bulletin has had many different incarnations over its 73 year history. In 2007 the decision was made to move the Bulletin away from print to an electronic-only format. The question soon arose over what that electronic format should look like. The editors at the time tried two approaches simultaneously. First, the Bulletin was released as a single file PDF, which was essentially the same in most respects as the former print edition. Next, the Bulletin was set up on Open Journal System (OJS), a journal publishing system developed by the Public Knowledge Project at Simon Fraser University. OJS was selected because it was used for other journals familiar to APLA members, specifically Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP) and Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, and was relatively easy to use.  
 

OJS quickly turned out to be more complicated than expected. The features that made it great for running a peer reviewed journal, e.g. the automation of the submission and peer review process, did not incorporate easily into the Bulletin’s existing workflow. This might have been overcome but the editors did not have the time to fully investigate ways of streamlining the OJS workflow. Consequently, OJS was put on the back burner and the Bulletin continued to be published solely as a PDF.
 

When the new editorial team took over in fall 2008 it was suggested by the outgoing editors that we examine the OJS situation and see what could be done with it. Further impetus came from the impending move of the APLA website to a new home at the University of Prince Edward Island and it had to be decided whether OJS would be making the move or consigned to the cyber dustbin. The APLA website was also being redesigned using the Drupal content management system and it was suggested that we may be able to publish the Bulletin using Drupal’s Book feature, thereby eliminating the need for OJS.  
 

Several outstanding issues with OJS needed to be addressed if it was going to serve as our future publication platform. The most important of which was the amount of time it took to produce an issue as opposed to simply making a single-file PDF version. OJS allows articles to be posted in many different formats. The first experiments of the previous editors used PDF files but most journals offer both HTML and PDF files to their readers. Using the workflow created by the previous editors to create an issue in OJS using either format required considerable work on the part of the editor. Each article needed to be made into a PDF or HTML file which the editor then had to push through the system.  
 

Before any attempt was made to fix this process I contacted the layout editors of the other journals to ask about their workflow and to see if OJS could do some of the conversion work for me. The reply I got was somewhat disappointing. OJS was unable to do any of the messy conversion work for me and their work flow seemed to be as time consuming as that of the previous Bulletin editors.  
 

Having to convert each article was time consuming and annoying but in the final analysis didn’t require much more time than producing a single-file PDF issue. The problem was that once the article was in the proper format it then had to be pushed through the peer-review module, which was time consuming. Still, the editors would have been willing to put in the time this process required if it produced a product that the membership was happy with. The feedback on the test issues put up by the previous editors suggested that people wanted to be able to read straight through the Bulletin like a magazine and not read an article then go back to the index to click on the next article like OJS forced you to do. Clearly, OJS was not suitable for our needs.
 

We decided that I would test Drupal to see if it would suit our needs. In the interim we would publish the Bulletin as a single file PDF as the previous editors had done.
 

Drupal offers many different options for publishing content. The “collaborative document” type has many obvious organizational advantages for the Bulletin. A collaborative document is organized like a book, so that there is a cover screen and a series of ‘children’ pages. Each article is provided with navigation links to adjacent articles. This makes the reading experience much more like reading a book (or a PDF). Most importantly, it eliminates the constant back and forth flow problems experienced in OJS. Using this document type has allowed The Bulletin to be arranged as if it were a bound volume; for example, one can read the last article of Volume 72 Issue 1, and then click right into the table of contents of Issue 2.
 

There were some initial hiccups with the setup and organization of the pages. These were quickly overcome with some timely help from Donald Moses. Drupal has proved to be easy to use and, more importantly, easy to mesh with our current workflow. Content can be cut and pasted from word with a minimum amount of modification. The only major difference between the Drupal and old PDF versions is that Drupal requires pictures to be uploaded as separate files. Though the pictures require a bit of time to touch up, the layout is so much simpler in Drupal that putting together an issue is actually faster than assembling the old PDF version.
 

Going forward, the Bulletin will primarily use Drupal to publish content. A PDF version will be released after the Drupal version, and will be linked from the main Bulletin page. The PDF version is being retained both for those who prefer to read/print in that format, and also for preservation purposes. The PDF version will continue to be deposited in the APLA archives to ensure the continuity of the preserved record.
 

If you have any questions about the new Bulletin layout please contact me:
Ian Gibson, MISt
Science Research Liaison Librarian
Queen Elizabeth II Library
Memorial University of Newfoundland
email: igibson@mun.ca
phone: +1 (709) 737-2080