When I wrote about my sabbatical leave, I mentioned setting some things aside to focus my research. That continues. Since my transfer research project continues to take up as much time as I can devote to it, I’ve decided to step down as website editor of Composition Forum. I’ve maintained the web site since Spring 2005, when the journal moved from print to online format. We’ve posted a position announcement and plan for a Summer 2012 transition. I’ll work with the incoming editor or editors to complete CF26 (a special issue on transfer guest-edited by Elizabeth Wardle), then step aside.
I’ve done some interesting things with CF, I think, and I’m proud of the journal’s high accessibility and quality of markup. Yeah, there are some irregularities, if you compare the first and last issues I created, but things are very stable overall, and articles load fast and print well.
Here’s a list of the things I did in my seven years with the journal:
- Moved the journal from servers at a university to its own domain, publishing redirects for existing articles and building a lightweight content management system for delivering content
- Built an index in Delicious, providing an easy way to move between subject areas or to see all of a particular type of article in the journal
- Established standards for metadata, ensuring that articles and profiles have abstracts and keywords
- Installed OJS and helped Michelle Ballif learn to use it to smooth editorial workflow for articles
What would I like to see incoming editor(s) do?
- Keep my commitment to high-quality, lightweight, accessible markup.
- Finish the conversion to OJS, importing existing issues into that system.
- Add online issues not in our Delicious index (and consider moving away from Delicious to a different platform for indexing).
- Tackle some of the big projects I started but did not finish—establishing a way to forward link citations between Composition Forum and other journals.
At CCCC this past week, I met with the CF editorial staff and made plans for transition. Just a matter of finding a replacement, getting them started, and handing over the keys.
