A large display about the Pathfinder Reprint Project was featured in the main conference meeting hall. Alongside it were tables full of 95 books and pamphlets supporters have put in digital form since early 1998, making possible their production by Pathfinder's print shop in New York.

Two leaders of the supporters' nationally coordinated efforts spoke at the closing conference session. Ruth Cheney, a member of the Reprint Project steering committee, reported the volunteers' progress and new goals. Sara Gates from Seattle outlined the accomplishments and new goals of supporters in raising monthly financial contributions to the Socialist Workers Party.

"Starting this month, we aim to increase our monthly production to six completed titles," Cheney said in an August 14 phone interview. "Our goal is: 30 more books by the 42nd anniversary of the Cuban Revolution--January 1, 2001!" Volunteers plan to "have 50 percent of Pathfinder's titles converted to computer files and production-ready on compact discs by May Day of next year."  
 
Fruits of volunteers' efforts
The two-year-old project has built momentum as the fruits of the volunteers' efforts--the books and pamphlets--have multiplied and been put to use by communist workers and youth. The "reprint army" has grown substantially this year, winning recruits in the United States and other countries.

The conference display charted the progress. During the first 5 months of the project supporters produced only 2 books. Over the next 13 months, 38 books were produced for a rate of 2.9 per month. From August 1999 through July 2000, supporters turned in 51 digital books to Pathfinder for its shop, for a monthly rate of 4.25. To meet the new goals, volunteers will step up the pace to 6.3 books per month.

"The work of the Reprint Project is to make the continuity of the communist movement, the line of march of the working class, and a Marxist explanation of today's world accessible to vanguard workers and farmers," read the first panel in the display. That panel featured photographs of socialist workers and youth selling Pathfinder books on the streets, at strikes and demonstrations, and at book fairs, as well as a number of pictures of union rallies, organizing drives, and picket lines. Pride of place was given to a group photograph of workers at Dakota Premium Foods in St. Paul, Minnesota, the night before the union representation vote there.

As volunteers convert the titles from film to computer-based technology, they update the typography and make the books and pamphlets more readable. The new technology also makes it possible to print short runs to respond rapidly to demand generated by political events.

A few days after the conference, Joanne Murphy, a party supporter from Iowa, wrote a letter to SWP national secretary Jack Barnes saying how much she had appreciated the gathering politically, including the proofreading workshop she had participated in.

In his reply to Murphy, Barnes pointed to a decisive aspect of the political contribution party supporters are making that is often not thought about. "In addition to meeting the goals of putting in digital form every book, pamphlet, and education bulletin produced by our movement," he said, "a much bigger accomplishment is being prepared.

"Together with the shop, they are helping put in place, for the first time in history," Barnes said, "an irreplaceable, web-based infrastructure of digital propaganda production, decentralized so that no matter what financial, security, or other conditions may confront the communist party in the decades ahead, the program and legacy of the modern revolutionary workers movement can be prepared outside any physical 'brick-and-mortar' apparatus and then printed on presses wherever they can be found and whenever they can be paid for.

"What the Bolsheviks would have given for that!"

Continued upward pace of production is built on a solid infrastructure and increased skills at every stage of the production pipeline. But the goals can only be met with reinforcement of new volunteers, and some reorganization, Cheney explained. This was the goal of workshops held the last day of the conference on different stages of digitizing a book: indexing, proofreading, checking the proofread text, formatting, and graphics. Pathfinder's exacting standards, the criteria for each task, common problems and errors, and the ins and outs of software the volunteers use were all discussed.

Among the 60 or so volunteers who participated were around 15 who signed up during the conference. "We encouraged them to participate in the indexing workshop," said Cheney. To make the contents of the books as accessible as possible to new worker-readers, Pathfinder titles often include indexes as well as glossaries, photo signatures, maps, and footnotes. For each newly formatted book, renumbering the page references in the indexes is part of completing the job, called "concordance." At the moment indexing is an understaffed department, "a clog in the pipeline," she said.

After reviewing the project's productivity goals, said Dean Denno, organizers of the indexing workshop focused on "the political importance of indexes and the reasons for concordance. We went through the entire process as experienced by a volunteer, from getting an assignment, to use of the Internet-accessible database where the production flow is centralized. We also reviewed how to avoid some common errors," he said.

"Some new volunteers are afraid they can't work in the project because they've seldom used a computer," Cheney said. The workshops and other training help overcome that trepidation.

Peggy Brundy, who helped lead the workshops on indexing and format checking, reports that 35 people attended the indexing workshop. Six signed up to join the project and 10 for new pledges to keep the project self-financed by the volunteers themselves.

Tom Tomasko is a member of the steering committee and also helps organize graphics production. Referring to two software programs used in the graphics work, Tomasko said, "Along with other volunteers, I learned some things in the workshop, including some new tricks in Quark. And having no experience whatever in Photoshop, I saw that I could also master enough of this program to do what we need for our books."  
 
Proofreading skills
Through discussions at the conference and the proofreading workshop, a number of volunteers "agreed to take on additional responsibility for organizing this step in the production work flow," said Holly Harkness from Atlanta. This includes setting up a help desk for the proofreading team and updating a bulletin providing guidelines to the proofreading checkers who review all work before sending it on to be formatted. "We made progress in defining our standards and procedures for that critical stage of our work," she said. Thirty volunteers attended the workshop, including three who hadn't been involved in the project before.

This was a rewarding conference for the supporters, said Cheney. Many came to a new appreciation of how integral their work is to building a working-class vanguard today. More clearly than ever before, "we see the books as weapons for working people," she emphasized. "What would it be like--a world without these books?"

Sara Gates explained that supporters surpassed the goal of contributing $200,000 a year to the party, hitting what would be a total of $235,000 this year. These contributions "mean that the party can make the politically bold and necessary moves" to go where fights and brewing struggles by working people are shaping up, Gates said to the closing session.

"We are making it easier for the party to make the decisions that are politically necessary in these times of structuring the party through mass work," Gates said, "including using the newly printed and reprinted books, pamphlets, and magazines in the most extensive manner."

In June, 270 people made monthly financial contributions, Gates said. The collections and work to keep track of contributions is organized by party supporters locally and coordinated nationally. "A committee meets every month and sends out a mailing summarizing the financial picture, passes on ideas, and includes a four-month chart of each area's contributions," Gates explained. "Regular monthly meetings with supporters organized by party branches have contributed to the steady rise in monthly pledges."

Gates announced plans to raise the annual contributions by the end of the year to $250,000. A second goal "is for every area to send in their pledges every month in full and on time. We pledge to do our part for the party as it deepens its participation in worker and farmer struggles, which have inspired us at this conference. On to one-quarter of a million dollars in supporter contributions by the end of year 2000! We can do it! Sí se puede!" said Gates to extended applause.