BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
"We need to reenlist volunteers who signed up months ago to
digitize Pathfinder books but who we have not given assignments
to on a regular basis," said Peggy Brundy in a telephone
interview from her home near Oakland, in the San Francisco Bay
Area, December 23. "We also need to sign up new volunteers. We
are now in a position to train them and utilize all their
energies. And we are organizing to shift some of the most
experienced volunteers scanning and proofreading books to the
finishing part of the process, where we've had the most
bottlenecks the past few months."
Brundy is the production coordinator of the international project to put the entire arsenal of Pathfinder books and pamphlets into electronic format. She is also a member of the steering committee organizing dozens of supporters of the communist movement around the world to carry out this historic task, which will make it possible for Pathfinder's print shop to use newly acquired computer-to-plate (CTP) technology (see article on facing page).
This is necessary to reduce the size of the print shop, cutting labor time necessary to produce Pathfinder books, increasing the productivity of that labor, lowering the skill levels needed to work in the shop, and driving down production costs while sacrificing nothing on Pathfinder's standards of quality. Only this course will allow sustaining production of Pathfinder - a publishing house helping to build the communist movement in the United States and internationally - and keeping its entire back list of 350 titles in print. This revolutionary literature is more in demand today among workers, farmers, and young people resisting deteriorating living and working conditions that the capitalist owners in crisis are trying to impose on the working class.
In addition to Brundy, Ruth Cheney, Jerry Gardner, and Tom Tomasko - all supporters of the Socialist Workers Party - are on the Pathfinder reprint project steering committee. Norton Sandler, who is assigned by the SWP Political Committee to be the liaison with the volunteer organizers in the Bay Area, is the organizer of the committee.
The steering committee held an expanded meeting in the Bay Area December 16-17. Besides its members, Mary-Alice Waters, president of Pathfinder Press and editor of New International, and Argiris Malapanis, who is assigned by the party's Political Committee to centralize the work of all departments in the publishing apparatus related to this effort, took part in the gathering.
Washington's brutal bombing of Iraq, which began hours before the steering committee started its meeting, underlined the need for keeping in print the titles volunteers are digitizing, said Sandler.
That night, and in subsequent days, members and supporters of the SWP and Young Socialists in the Bay Area and beyond sold many pamphlets and books to young people and others protesting the Clinton administration's imperial assault as well as to workers at factory gates, on picket lines, and on the job.
Where the project stands
During the December 16-17 gathering, and at a meeting of the
steering committee a week later, said Brundy, "we stepped back
from the daily pressures of trying to complete this or that book
and looked at whether we could meet the goal we set for ourselves
of digitizing 10 books per month."
That's what's needed to keep up with the publisher's current level of sales and reverse the process of more Pathfinder books going out of stock. About 20 Pathfinder titles were out of stock at the beginning of December. The transformation of book production in Pathfinder's print shop carried out this year allows the publisher to reprint only books that are prepared in digital form.
Between May - when supporters of the communist movement put into electronic format the first book, Revolution Betrayed by Leon Trotsky - and August, volunteers digitized one book per month. During that initial period, they only put into electronic format the text of the books. At an expanded meeting of the steering committee in Detroit at the end of September, volunteer organizers took steps to digitize all covers and internal graphics and deliver the books to Pathfinder completed on a CD- ROM, ready to produce printing plates through the print shop's CTP equipment. The Detroit meeting also took on the goal of producing 20 books in the last quarter of 1998.
The target proved more difficult to meet. Between October 1 and December 1, the production rate remained at an average of one book per month.
Two books and one pamphlet were delivered to Pathfinder for reprinting in these three months-Cuba for Beginners, Panama: The Truth About the U.S. Invasion, and The Changing Face of U.S. Politics: Working-Class Politics and the Trade Unions.
Need more volunteers to work weekly
This has begun to change in December. Two titles have already
been completely digitized and delivered to Pathfinder this month
for reprinting - Women and the Cuban Revolution and the Spanish-
language edition of the pamphlet Che Guevara and the Fight for
Socialism Today. The steering committee projects that at least
another two titles will be delivered on CD-ROM before New Year's
Day.
"After considerable discussion, the steering committee decided that we can now organize ourselves effectively to complete 10 books per month," said Brundy.
The first step in this direction is ensuring everyone who wants to be part of the project has work every week, she continued. More than 150 supporters of the communist movement have signed up since the project was launched at a regional socialist conference in Seattle last year. "But of those, only 85 are working every week," said Brundy. "When we first started we were less experienced and not organized well enough to give assignments to all these volunteers. A number were discouraged by being idle. But now we face the opposite problem. We don't have enough volunteers to give assignments to. We have all parts of the project on line -scanning, proofreading, formatting, and graphics work - and can organize more people to do work every week."
Stop leaving roads unfinished
Volunteers have made a lot of progress towards increasing
productivity in scanning and proofreading books. "And we've made
real progress in formatting them also," said Brundy. "We've been
bogged down mostly on the finishing stage. Formatting and
graphics don't have enough people to complete all the tasks they
are responsible for."
The formatting production team is responsible for laying out the pages electronically, correcting the index to make sure its references correspond to the new pagination, and checking the entire digitized text of the book. After that process is completed, the book is sent electronically to Pathfinder for a final check. When formatting volunteers focus on the first stages of the process, the last stages don't get done, and vice-versa, said Brundy. As a result, she added, during the month of November only one book was turned into Pathfinder's print shop for reprinting but eight were almost finished in formatting and graphics. It has occasionally taken weeks to finish correcting the few errors the Pathfinder staff asks to be corrected.
Addressing this problem at the beginning of December, the steering committee decided to focus the attention and resources of both the formatting and graphics teams on finishing books. As a result, formatting and graphics have already finished five books this month.
The steering committee has now established that a book is completed only when the CD-ROM, with all the elements on it, is burned and delivered to the print shop for production.
In a recent steering committee meeting Mary-Alice Waters drew an analogy between this and the many roads in Cuba that were started but never finished in the 1970s and early '80s, so administrators could chalk up having met their quotas, said Brundy. She was referring to discussions initiated by the leadership of the Communist Party of Cuba in the mid 1980s, in what is known as the rectification process. Its aim was to carry out a historic correction to the course of the revolution and confront problems that had developed for more than a decade by using the economic priorities and methods borrowed from the former Soviet Union as a guide. As part of confronting the corrupting and demoralizing political consequences of that course, the Cuban communist leadership pointed to many construction projects, including roads, that were left unfinished while administrators claimed they had been completed so they could get bonuses from fulfilling their quotas.
"The steering committee is determined not to make that mistake!" Brundy said.
The steering committee decided to assign more volunteers who have a proven record of timeliness in meeting deadlines and of quality work to the finishing stage of a book, regardless of where they had been working previously.
"We want to avoid what happened with one 36-page pamphlet, for example," Brundy noted. Because the steering committee didn't act decisively to solve technical problems that cropped up in the finishing stage, "it took us five weeks to do the final check of the pamphlet, instead of one week or less."
In order to produce 10 books a month, the formatting team needs to assign the most experienced volunteers to specifically make these finishing stages run smoothly. To make this possible the steering committee decided to shift some of the most experienced volunteers who had concentrated on scanning and proofreading to the formatting/indexing production team. Initial assignments will bring those involved in formatting and indexing books to 20, up from 15. "And more are needed to meet the production goal of 10 books per month," said Brundy. "We need people who can commit at least five hours per week. Formatting and graphics work are very deadline-oriented and where we face the main logjams.
"In addition, a number of experienced formatters outside the Bay Area are taking on more responsibility in the final checking of books." Fred Stanton in New York and Robbie Scherr in Seattle are among them. "The leadership of the project is broadening," Brundy said.
Up until now, much of the checking work was done by Gardner, organizer of the formatting team, and Brundy. Because volunteers have stepped forward to take on the checking responsibilities, Gardner and Brundy can now concentrate their energies more on the overall coordination of the project.
These changes are possible because of the progress registered in the organization and leadership of the project as a whole, said Brundy.
Progress in scanning, proofreading
"It's now possible to shift some people over and still
achieve our goal of scanning and massaging all the books by the
beginning of the year 2000, which will be a big morale booster
for everyone," said Tom Tomasko, organizer of the scanning team
that now numbers 18 volunteers. "We can easily train new
volunteers in scanning, the first stage of converting a book into
electronic format."
Tomasko's crew completed 12 books in October, 8 in November, and are well on their way of finishing 16 in December. Their goal is an average of scanning 18 books per month in 1999. Each volunteer is asked to commit a certain number hours of work per week. Follow through on training and detailed attention to production rates and quality by the organizers has paid off.
Proofreading the electronic files provided by the scanners against the original manuscript, and correcting errors - the second stage in the production process - is also advancing rapidly towards completing 10 books per month. This is one of the most time-consuming tasks. About 35 volunteers are actively involved in proofreading at the moment.
Ruth Cheney, organizer of the proofreading team, said that the production rate has increased from five books in October to seven in November and eight in December. Steve Marshall in Detroit organizes a proofreading bulletin for first reads of titles. Cheney organizes a similar bulletin for those doing the second, and final, reads. The bulletin lists books in order of priorities. "Those who have more time in the short run can volunteer for more hours," Cheney said.
The steering committee is now organizing to post this bulletin on the volunteer web site, administered by Janice Prescott in New York. "We are also planning to make available to volunteers scanned pages of books in portable document format (pdf) that volunteers can use in proofreading," Cheney said. This format allows photographic images of book pages to be transmitted electronically. The scanning production team will produce these images.
"Making as many of them as possible available electronically to volunteers will cut down the time and money that all the departments currently expend in mailing book pages to volunteers using the post office," Brundy noted.
"Over the coming weeks we will be taking other steps to make our web site more of a working site, not an ornamental spot," said Brundy. For example, the steering committee is planning to alter the production chart now posted on this web site, and update it daily, so everyone involved can find out easily at any time where each element of the book is at in the production chain. "We are also discussing the possibility of making proofreading files available from our web site," Brundy added.
This Web site can be accessed at http://www. pfvolcenter.com
Tackling challenge of graphics
Digitizing covers and internal graphics of books is one of
the main challenges of volunteer organizers. This work is
centralized through Bobbi and Greg Sack, who live in Cincinnati,
Ohio.
Brundy and Gardner have regular consultations with the Sacks at least once a week now.
The graphics team of 14 is taking steps to organize better its division of labor, said Bobbi Sack in a telephone interview December 23. Arthur Hughes in New York, for example, is assigned to produce in digital form the bar code that goes on the back cover of every book. And Pete Evans in London, England, is centralizing the selection of type fonts for covers to match the original design and in training others in this task.
"Pathfinder's recent decision to send us scanned photographs, rather than the original prints or film of pictures, is very welcome," said Sack. It has significantly cut down on labor time needed to organize scanning of photos, and has reduced the cost of using commercial service bureaus for this task. Sack said the scans sent by the Pathfinder staff compare very favorably to those her team used to produce through commercial companies.
The graphics team began to coalesce in October and has the least collective experience in one of the most complicated parts of the production process. In addition to improving the training and organization of its current members, however, more volunteers are needed.
"My rough estimate is that we need to nearly double our numbers to about 25 volunteers," Sack stated, "to be able to digitize book graphics at the rate of 10 books per month."
Those who would like to join any aspect of the project, or reenlist after a period of inactivity, can do so by contacting the Pathfinder volunteer reprint project steering committee at rcheney3@compuserve.com
December 23, 1998
Dear Volunteer,
I would like to ask your help in financing the project to convert Pathfinder's 350 titles to digital form. As you know, a call was put out several months ago for volunteers to help on this ambitious project. Today, more than 150 supporters and friends of Pathfinder Press, from around the world, have responded, and most of those who volunteered are today busy scanning, proofreading, formatting, indexing, and reproducing the graphics and covers for the Pathfinder titles.
This will make it possible for the Pathfinder printshop to output these titles on new state of the art computer-to-plate technology. This printing equipment was installed in the printshop in November and it is enabling the size of the printshop staff to be reduced substantially.
But these sweeping changes in the printshop are dependent on a steady stream of books being sent in each month by our international volunteer team. The steering committee is taking steps to improve our organization so that we can soon reach the target of having 10 titles a month delivered to the printshop.
The work of the volunteers converting the titles to digital form is organized by e-mail, and increasingly through our website http://www.pfvolcenter.com
From the beginning this project has been self-financed with the costs absorbed by the volunteers. But as we took on reproducing the covers and photographs we found out how expensive this aspect of publishing books is. In fact, the expenses for the graphics are more than what any individual or small group of volunteers can afford. That's why we need your help.
To keep the books in print as we project, we must raise $25,000 for next year's graphics budget. We are constantly working to streamline and professionalize this unique project but we must have contributions that cover our expenses. If you consider our efforts to keep the full range of Pathfinder titles in print a value, please help by making a financial contribution. A monthly contribution of $20 or more from 100 volunteers would go a long way toward keeping the project rolling on target. We also need your ideas or suggestions on other friends of the project who can be contacted for substantially larger contributions. If you give us suggestions, we will organize to get in touch with them.
Thank you for your time and consideration. A check can be made out to "Reprint Project" and mailed to the address below:
Checks can be mailed to Reprint Project, 3542 Fruitvale Ave. #245, Oakland, California 94602-2327.
Sincerely,
Ruth Cheney
For the Reprint Project Steering Committee