On Oct 15, 2004, at 1:01 PM, Scott A. Golder wrote:
Nancy Baym wrote:
The archives are only available to AoIR members. Access to the archives is a benefit of membership, not a component of conference registration. For information on becoming a member, visit the URL at the very end of this message. We realize that people who attend a conference but are not members are sometimes disgruntled with this. However, the archives include all five conferences we have had, not just the most recent one, and the membership fees are low and include a variety of discounts on journal subscriptions and books as well as archive access.
I understand why multi-year archives are accessible to members only; after all, AoIR is an organization that costs money to run and maintain.
However, I'd suggest that the reason conference attendees have been disgruntled, is that AoIR's practice is wrong. In my understanding of how these things work (and I may be incorrect), when people pay to go to a conference, they are paying for access to the materials that are presented there. This includes not only the live sessions, but also the papers from those sessions (either digitally or hard copy). Is this something that maybe varies by discipline?
I'd say your understanding is not correct, because it varies by association. we don't require people to send papers either, so even if you think you will get the paper you want, you might not, the authors may never submit it.
Granted, if an attendee really wants a particular paper, it's pretty easy to email the author for a copy, but this prevents casually browsing through the papers.
that is perfectly fine.
I'm curious, what is the rationale behind the decision to not make papers available to the attendees of the conferences in which they were presented?
it is one of the few members benefits that we have, plus maintaining a website for each conference is much more work, than maintaining one website for members :) these are my opinions of course, but then I'm one of the people that has been maintaining these websites:) the members website will be back up, in November and members will have access again then. Jeremy Hunsinger Center for Digital Discourse and Culture () ascii ribbon campaign - against html mail /\ - against microsoft attachments