There are several technical reasons our legacy platform for searchable Proceedings were disabled. First, it was a system we cobbled together that, with changes in technology, did not work very well. The searches were giving weird results and the process for getting new volumes on there was unreliable and prone to error. We also moved our website to a new platform that did not support our legacy system. We found we were causing more frustration than solving it. The older volumes are also not OCR-capable, so recreating the database is a huge project that is unlikely at the moment.
Given the need to make our proceedings more accessible to members at large, we are trying to come up with a multi-pronged approach to making them available. This includes:
1. Making PDFs of the last ten years available on our site. While this does not allow for a global search, it does allow for someone to search through each PDF using the built-in search function if they know which volume they are looking at.
2. We are still working on porting the searchable database into a new system that will give a citation for the article without links to the PDFs so then people can download the volume of interest and find the article.
3. We just signed a contract with EBSCO and will be signing a contract with ProQuest to have these database companies (which most academics can access through their libraries) to port the volumes over to their databases so members can access the articles through their library.
4. We are exploring innovative ways of providing access to the entire database by working with a company called Hyperthesis which will use AI algorithms to not only allow search of the database, but also provide meaningful links between the articles to allow researchers to identify themes that may not be obvious when reading a single article.
These are all independently large projects and we had to move to our new website immediately, so we see the proceedings as being "offline" as we build these options. Our content has been available in EBSCO databases in the past and should still be searchable there. Have you tried using EBSCO through your library?
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Creating the proceedings each year is a joint effort (office manager, conference chairs, Omnipress, Ex Ordo)
Bowker - ISBN - Fill out the form for the current year's proceedings and generate a barcode to send to Omnipress.
Once the proceedings are complete:
Spreadsheet with start and end page numbers (format - Title, short abstract, authors, & page numbers). Once the proceedings database is complete and posted it takes several days to a week for the database to be searchable. Once this is complete it should be announced to ACR Members, all social media, and ACR ListServ
Post pdf on ACR website
Place all orders for attendees who purchased a hardcopy with their registration
Orders must be paid in full (including shipping) by the customer before it's ordered from Omnipress - through the Omnipress order fulfillment site.
Omnipress orders username: bmonahan Password: Acr19Taco
Domestic shipping select USPS Bound Printed Matter
For international shipping select USPS Int'l Priority Mail
Omnipress Share file https://omnipress.sharefile.com/home/shared
Aaron Nord - anord@omnipress.com
Project Manager, Omnipress
800.828.0305 | omnipress.com