Dear Board Members,<br><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">Thank you all for your good wishes on the e-publication of <em>Basic Writing</em> by George Otte and me. It's exciting to see the work of many years available at last. We are so pleased that the book is available free to anyone who wants to read part or all of it.</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">Meanwhile, I'm writing to ask you to consider another longstanding project related to basic writing. For several years, we've been trying to make all the past issues of the <em>Journal of Basic Writing</em> available online, open access, but we need a small amount of money to hire a tech person to get this to actually happen. At the moment, here's where we stand: Mike Palmquist of the WAC Clearinghouse has enthusiastically agreed to host the archive on their site. A librarian at our college has carefully scanned most of these issue into searchable PDFs. But we need to hire a tech person here in NYC to work with the Clearinghouse to get this archive up and running. I think our wonderful editorial assistant Corey Frost would be able to do this in the spring or summer for about $1,000. I don't know what the financial situation of CBW is at the moment, but even a partial contribution to this end (which would of course be acknowledged on the website) would be a great help. </div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">If I recall correctly, Greg is the treasurer, and I'm not sure that Greg will be able to attend the meeting. But Greg, if you could find a way to let us know the status of the treasury, that would be helpful.</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">A historical footnote: now that we have changed printers, there are no more stored copies of previous issues, so if we don't manage to host these issues online, some of them will really be lost; there will be no way for composition scholars to access them in the future.</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">I know how busy you are all, getting ready to leave for Louisville. But Shannon thought it would be good to touch base with you before the exec board meeting. Any comments or suggestions would be welcome, and then perhaps we won't have to spend as much time discussing this at the meeting.</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">All the best,</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">Rebecca</div>
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<div class="gmail_quote">Rebecca</div></font><br>