by Jon Jablonski
Welcome to the first issue of the new digital Information Bulletin. I am writing this with Tom Brittnacher sitting at my side as we finish configuring the WordPress template and populating the issue with content. This is a major step forward for WAML– abandoning the print world and jumping in to online self-publishing. Having Tom with me in Santa Barbara has made me appreciate anew how much faster things go when you can work together synchronously and face-to-face. This reminds us that good old fashioned face-to-face collaboration continues to be important, no matter how digital we think our world is. Making this transition would have been much more difficult if we were doing it via email and phone. Instead, we have hunkered down and created a new platform for WAML’s publishing efforts largely by sitting next to each other. We’re still working on it! We are not quite sure what the final form of News & Notes will be. We continue to need more people to contribute content–people who are willing to experiment with embedding interactive maps and media into articles. And we continue to work out administrative details: we already have our new new ISSN, but we still need to register ourselves with the Directory of Open Access Journals, and there will likely be changes to the new ‘frontispiece’ material. And yes, we debated about the use of the word frontispiece in today’s world (that’s the ‘about’ page, for you digital natives out there). What we do know is that WordPress is working well. It’s easy to change the look and feel of the site, and we didn’t struggle too much coming up with an organizational structure for the content. We even re-published volume 45 number 3 online so that there would be more than just one issue on the website when we release this volume 46, number 1: our first digital Information Bulletin.