DR. NATRIELLO: What I thought I would do is to step through some of the work we have been doing at TC to give you an example of what we have been able to do by taking the journal online and doing a lot of things that John has talked about, really trying to grow an audience and trying to connect with that audience and then feed in one sense the energy of that audience back into the journal process, the journal production process and the content development process.

What I thought I would do is show you the Teachers College Record the way it looks online because what my experience has been is that I often talk to people about the journal and everyone nods their heads and in fact the people in places like this who I am talking to aren't the people who are reading the journal these days.

There are lots of people who are not in ed research who are not in scholarly work who are out in schools who are in policy, who are in other kinds of venues or in the press who constitute I think the largest part of the journal's audience.

The audience at this point is about 75,000 folks who have registered to use the journal. That is not all the people who use it but those are the people who have registered to use it and about 35,000 of those actually take a weekly newsletter in which they introduce new content and the audience is growing at about 20,000 folks a year or at least it has been for the last couple of years.

That is in contrast to what is going on in the print world where print subscriptions for the most part in our journal and a lot of others are declining and they are declining both at the individual level and for a lot of journals they are declining at the institutional level. TC Record is not one of those. Our institutional subscriptions are actually going up pretty substantially in a kind of mixed message though they are going up largely through consortium buy in.

So, we are now in all of the Canadian academic libraries but our subscription revenue remains what it was when we were in three of them. We are now in all of the academic and in fact community libraries in Ohio and our subscription revenue is about what it was when we were in half a dozen of them.

So, the growth is taking place. The income is not quite keeping pace with that. This is a screen shot of the journal the way it looked at November 1, which was a weekend. So, this is our weekend edition. The journal comes out twice a week online. It comes out in print, this year it came out nine times a year in print. Next year it will be monthly in print.

One of the things that has happened to the print journal is that as a result of having the online version submissions are up very substantially and we have expanded the print production correspondingly. So, we are up and running about 600 to 700 submissions this year and that in a frightening sense has been doubling for the last 3 years ever since we went online.

So, there is a lot more visibility for the journal, a lot more submissions, no decrease in quality but no dramatic increase in quality, that is we are still publishing about 10 percent and that is what we were publishing 3 or 4 years ago as well before we had expanded.

So, we are still going through all of those processing chores that people described earlier. You see on the home page here every weekend we, and I am going to try to talk about these issues of accumulation and synthesizing. Every weekend we take a particular theme. We publish from Friday through Sunday. We regroup articles that we previously published and we put them out in a kind of consolidated way. The students who work with me on the journal are convinced that I am the only person who reads the weekend journal, that in fact all sensible people would not be reading Educational Research from Friday through Sunday, but in fact the data suggest that we get probably four or five hundred people a day during the weekend, and I suspect it is graduate students with deadlines and things of that sort.

Just to give you an orientation to what is here in addition to sort of feature articles down the center, we have some book reviews which we publish over on the side. We also publish community discussion, that is we invite people to comment on articles and on themes and content and we put that right up front on the home page. That raises all kinds of issues about quality and about how good that discussion actually is in terms in terms of contributing to discussion and again it is a relatively diverse audience.

So, I want to talk about technology, communication and audience, the three themes for this session and sort of play out how they have worked in our version of the online journal.

Starting with technology, the technology story is now a pretty old one but it is one that I think has been helpful for us. We moved the entire journal operation into desktop publishing about 4 or 5 years ago which meant that we started archiving everything digitally and put in a content management system and finally put in the online delivery for the journal, for the online journal and that ended up reducing our costs pretty dramatically. It reduced labor costs. It increased performance. So, we are now publishing many more pages per year than were published in the past.

It, also, did something else which deans are often interested in knowing about and that is we don't admit this but we no longer actually need physical space to publish the journal. The journal can be published on a machine like this. It can be published in your den. It can be published at the airport kiosk. We have not advertised that on campus. So, in fact we still do have a physical location which is comforting if an author drops by.

The implications for accumulation, putting together a knowledge base that I would like to hit on with this example I think are four or five here, one, the notion of editing a collection not just the journal which I will say a little bit more about, two, the ability to link materials across decades and even longer, three, the ability to track progress of a series of articles that might develop over time, four, the ability to follow an author through his or her career and five, what we are calling seizing the teachable moment, and what I would like to do is give you an example of each of these, but I think they illustrate the more general point that in this kind of online publishing you can be much more active as an editor in tying material together for an audience.

I want to start with talking about editing the collection. One of the things that became very clear once we actually developed the online capacity was that online publishing creates a huge demand for content because you can publish as frequently as you want. You can publish in as many different forums as you want and if you really want to try out the value of linking you actually need a lot of other things to link to and ideally they would be things that you might have in your collection.

Fortunately TCR has been published since 1900. So, we have about 10 or 12 thousand articles that have been published over that period of time.

The first thing we did we was to put them all in a database or at least put the title and descriptive information in a database and that created a huge problem for us because it then gave us a database of wonderful things that we didn't have online, and we shared that with our readers and they had that wonderful experience, too of being able to click on something and be told that we don't have it and we are like a lot of journals working through that process.

We now have online everything from 1980 forward. We are working on the seventies and in the first quarter of 2004 we will be releasing everything from 1900 to 1920 online which is a whole new interesting set of content items.

What that required us to do however, was to think about how we would present these 10,000 items as we brought them online and so we developed what you see here circled in red, what we are calling these content collections and I would like to say that we had a very scientific strategy for identifying these titles and subtitles. In fact we did it pretty quickly just to try out how it might work.

We looked at AERA divisions. We looked at error indexing and we looked at one or two other category systems. In fact we came up with 16 big categories like administration, learning and policy and then a lot of little categories underneath them.

In the new journal system that we will be bringing out next year the category system will be flexible, that is categories will be able to move around; they will be able to be three and four deep. Information will be able to be recategorized as it seems appropriate and what we have learned is that over time the context in which readers are coming to articles actually changes the way they might want to classify them. So, they are sort of working through that process.

At any rate we have got these. We have got basically now every article that comes into the journal being classified under one of these 16 large categories and about 70 plus smaller categories.

If you go to a content collection you see something like this and it is pretty small. So, I will just quickly step through it, but you see a section of content from the journal itself. You see our best guess as to other journals that are publishing in this area.

One of the things we did was put a journal catalog together and again this was a result of an editors' meeting at AERA where editors were saying, "Gee, there is no central place to look at journals in education." So, one of the students on our staff put together a catalog of about 300 journals in the field of education with basic information about the journal, what they publish, what areas they publish in and it becomes most valuable when you are actually in a subject area and you see if I am publishing in mathematics education where is it that I might publish in addition to TC Record.

We list new books in education and we list research and development centers and finally we link to web content which turned out not to be an uncontroversial issue for both the staff and other editors because all of a sudden we were now presenting links to content that we didn't edit and we didn't control although we did select it. It is basically trying to put together a package of content for folks.

We, also, spend a fair amount of time trying to link incoming articles that we are publishing to articles that we published in the past. So, I figured this was an example that might be near and dear to this group. This is actually a book review that I did of the report Scientific Research in Education, a very favorable book review as you might imagine and then over on the left column we see other things the Record has published over the years that seem to be related to the topic of the book and the review, and so you see reviews of other books. You see earlier articles about educational research and if you were to go all the way down to the bottom and those articles are listed in reverse chronological order starting with the most recent, if you go all the way to the bottom which you can't see on this slide you eventually come to a 1931 article on the value of research in education by Edward Thorndyke and because TC Record has this phenomenal back catalog we can do this kind of stuff relatively easily and have a lot of fun with it and really if we were to go and read through this you could read pretty much in the last five or six decades what major figures have been writing about education research and what the problems are with it. So, you can see Thorndyke talking in 1931 about why we really ought to do more of it.

You can see Arthur Jenson in the sixties talking about what is wrong with schools of education. So, you really do get a kind of different sort of context with development of this work.

What we try to do is to place each new article within that kind of context and then we also let folks comment on the articles and you see there is a comment which may be more or less valuable over on the right there. We, also, try to track progress as another way to connect things and over the last 3 or 4 years we have published a series of articles by Dick Crowlett and his critics on interpreting John Dewey and whether John Dewey went through a major change halfway through his career and whether he was influenced by Paris at one point and had a sort of transformation in his thinking and I am just going to quickly go through this because there is a whole series of articles that we published.

There were two pieces by Dick Crowlett. Then there was a response from Jim Garrison who Crowlett attacked in one of his, at least Garrison believed he attacked him in one of his articles. Then there was a rejoinder from Crowlett to Garrison. Then there was another article by Stanick and Russell. Then there was another article by Crowlett who will not give up. Then there is yet another one, this time by Michael Glassman and finally a letter from Stanik and Russell and we published these articles over 3 or 4 years in the print journal. This summer we ran them online altogether week after week, and we now have a definitive answer to the question how many weeks can people stand to have this go on before they complain. It is about 6 weeks.

So, after about 6 weeks the online readers would e-mail me and say, "Will you ever publish anything that is not about Dewey and Dick Crowlett? Please stop." So, we knew that we had reached an end but it illustrates I think the point that you can pursue an issue. You can bring it to people's attention. You can take things that appeared over a period of time and set them close together and let people decide for themselves what sense to make of it.

We, also, like to think about the ability to track people and follow careers. This is different than a lot of journals I know which try to be very restrictive on how many pieces of content they will publish from any one author over any period of time.

Our strategy is just the opposite and that is we would like to pick up someone early in their career and have everything that is good that they are doing until they retire so that in fact we can begin to build some sense of progression and accumulation.

Now, we don't often succeed in doing that but if you send me a paper tomorrow that can start your series and then we had a couple of holiday events the last couple of years. We have had Dewey Fest 2000 which was a Christmas holiday celebration in which we brought out one piece per day every article that had ever been published by John Dewey or about John Dewey in the TC Record and that allowed me to take a nice Christmas vacation because I automated the publication schedule and didn't have to come back and deal with that and that actually generated between Christmas and New Year's over 1000 visitors reading those articles who otherwise would not have read them which may be a good thing.

The following year we didn't want to slight Thorndyke. So, we had a big Thorndykeapoloosa(?) extravaganza in which we published everything that Thorndyke had done. Thorndyke actually wrote quite a few pieces that appeared in the Record and we followed that up.

So, we like to do that. Finally, we tried to become more topical and tried to be mindful of what is going on and be mindful of the time and then to bring to the attention of readers things that are important in the field of scholarship and education and the best example we have here is in the fall of 2001, following the attacks on the Towers and the Pentagon we of course as many journals put out a call for papers on educators' response to the attack but we also discovered in our catalog archives a wonderful series of articles from the forties responding to the fall of France and the attack on Pearl Harbor which appeared in the Record at that time, starting with this really fascinating piece by William Russell who was both dean of the college, president of the college and editor of the journal. So, for editors who are feeling overworked, he was running the college and editing the journal. So, it couldn't have been that tough, but there was a wonderful phrase which I think illustrates the timeliness of some of this material that has gone by us, and I will just read it quickly.

Russell writes, "The day may come," and he is talking now about the fall of France and what this means, "The day may come when Americans may be forced to choose what they want to keep, Liberty Bell or the independence for which it sounded, Lexington and Concord or the ideals which were defended there, Old North Church or the religious fires that burned so brightly within its walls and inflamed a nation."

We brought this set of articles out in November following the September attack. So, this is a set of articles that probably would not have garnered much attention in any other context. We published, I think, about a dozen of them starting with Russell's article in 1940 and ending up with an article I think in 1946 about how to deal with the peace and what the obligations of a conquering nation were, and they turned out to be just a fascinating set of articles with lots of interest by lots of different readers.

I am going to go quickly because I only have 2 minutes and I wanted to say a little bit about this as a communication vehicle. One of the things it gives us is lots of choices, choices about how we want to put material together, how we want to bundle it, articles, series, compilations. It gives us articles about delivery time. We now publish twice a week, once on Monday and once on Friday. It gives us lots of choices and formats about the length of articles, the way we want to represent them. It gives us the opportunity for two-way interaction and it really changes the way we use time and space.

What it gives us that is enormously important for the kind of things that John was talking about is a different kind of knowledge of our audience. We know a little bit about their behavior. We know a little bit about what they are doing and when they are doing it. Everyone who logs into TC Record identifies themselves as a member and so what we have been doing is tracking over time traffic of the member visits to the site. Here you see a 1-year slice from June 2002 to May 2003, and you see we started with about 6000 folks a month. That is not 6000 total visits. That is 6000 different people coming each month to read the journal going up to about 9300 at the end of the year and that continues to rise.

We, also, know a little bit about their patterns. This is a 1-month slice looking at days of the week and so you start out with Sunday where we are getting 1000 or a little under on a typical Sunday. Midweek is when we send out the e-mail newsletter. So, there is a real interaction between letting people know you have got something new and whether in fact they come as a reminder. So, we see a spike on Tuesday or Wednesday and we are up to about 3500 or so. I think it is a little bit higher now. So, it is really a kind of audience-building strategy.

We know a lot about what they are doing and I will just go quickly through this but we know what articles they are looking at. So, we have got about 409,000 articles that were actually viewed by folks.

We know for example that the collections we put together are more popular than general searching on the site. So, one of the questions we had is what is the value of editorial collections. Well, we have got 148,000 accesses, uss of those collections and only 87,000 people using the general search strategy. So, we know that the collections seem to, we think we know that they seem to contribute something and we track things like downloads. We track things like articles that are printed. That doesn't mean printed other than the fact that we put them in a printer friendly format. So, we still have a lot of people who don't know about that even though there is a button for it and they may be printing it off TDF or printing it off of just the regular web screen.

We know there is a lot of, 39,000 folks reading collection posts, that is posts by other readers, not things that we have edited but comments on articles that were made by readers.

One of the things that authors report is when they publish with us online they get a lot of response to their articles because we let people e-mail them directly and they can get to the link for that right at the article.

So, there is a lot of opportunity to increase communication. The journal catalog gets a fair amount of use. The journal search gets a fair amount of use. One of the things we do for book reviews is we link people to Amazon and so we have sent 16,000 people to Amazon where they might want to buy the book and in fact we even generate a little revenue for the journal if they do buy a book not a lot but a little.

We let people e-mail articles to colleagues and that is reasonably popular. It happened about 10,000 times during that particular year and so on.

We, also, know we can track content. What are people reading in terms of the content collections? What are the things that most of our readers are coming for, and you see policy, curriculum, social context which are things the record I think is well known for generate the most kinds of traffic and as you go to the second page things like higher ed, international ed and counseling are relatively low.

Now, there are some interesting questions for editors that come out of this and that is you know, is that a problem? Should we be correcting that? Should we be doing a special issue on higher education or should we stick with things that people are already coming to us for and I don't think we have simple answers to those questions.

Finally, I think I would like to end with just sort of thinking about four strategies for building the knowledge base that grew out of our experience with the journal. One is the empirical strategy and I know folks have already talked about the notion of making data sets available online.

We have offered to do that for authors for about 4 or 5 years now. We have had no one take us up on that. So, we think our strategy needs to change. We just can't offer it. We have to illustrate it, put up examples, pay people to do it, things of that sort, make the tools better.

We, also, think there are theoretical strategies for knowledge accumulation that are probably under utilized certainly in the journal, probably in the field and that requires a different kind of work to tie things together theoretically in more powerful ways.

We think biographical strategies would also be useful to think about, that is I talked about the notion of whether the works of an author over time, trying to bring an author back to the same outlet, helping that author develop his or her voice within the field and then looking at that career development, looking at knowledge accumulated there and then finally a sort of social dimension, In the next generation of the journal there will be an ability for us to convene groups around content and to let those groups interact and then to summarize the results of that interaction in kind of a mini online kind of consensus conference.

So, there are lots of things that I think that we just sort of touched the surface on. In 2004, we will be bringing out a new generation of the journal which will give people a lot more choices including the choice to order your very own print copy of the journal picking whatever six or eight articles you think should be in the journal that year. So, we will have a kind of print on demand capacity and there is a paper called The Online Journal as a Virtual Learning Environment that is going to be coming out in the International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments I think that you can get online at my personal publishing site which is www.frameworkers.org and I would invite you to come take a look at that site because that is another experiment that we are involved in and that is really an attempt to build a site that handles both publishing and on-line learning anchored around a particular individual scholar and that is what would it look like if instead of having institutions run these things individuals ran these things for themselves and put together all of the things that they thought ought to be there, and we have now gotten the technology to the point where it is simple enough and inexpensive enough that it no longer requires a kind of major institutional commitment.

So, we can really start in a sense a journal or another kind of venue relatively quickly and relatively inexpensively I think along the lines that John has already talked about, and this opens I think a whole new set of opportunities for connecting the work of scholars directly to audiences that yet have to think about them.