Where has the time gone? When I retired, I thought I would have lots of time to write articles, but here it is, August, and I’ve sent only a couple. As I got closer to retiring, I asked all the retirees I knew what they did all day. The typical response was, “I don’t know, but I’m always busy!”
As noted in this month’s article, I spent some time going through old Construction Specifiers. My collection was not as complete as it could have been had I started saving them as soon as I joined CSI, but it did go back to the ’90s. I went through each issue, looking for historical items. There wasn’t as much as I had hoped to find, but much of that information was in the thin publications that were sent with most maga-zines for a long time. I had been keeping those, too, but when asked to reduce the size of my library several years ago, I threw them out. That was before I got interested in the history of CSI, so I thought the technical articles were far more im-portant than the pieces about members and activities.
As I looked through the magazines, I picked a few at random and noted the number of pages and how many pages were used for advertising, technical articles, and so on. A future article will be about those statistics.
I also noticed that a relatively small number of topics were addressed in many technical articles. We keep publishing similar articles about similar subjects, they’re sent to members who may or may not keep them (or even read them), and they’re soon forgotten and lost. This represents a tremendous investment in time by the authors, by the editors, by the edito-rial advisory board, and by the members. Most of that effort ends up being wasted, and the members see little long-term benefit from all that work. I know that’s the way it’s usually done, but can’t we do better?
It occurred to me that it would be a great service to our members if all CS articles were again made available online. The current publisher, Kenilworth, has online archives going back to 2008, but hundreds more were published before that year. At one time, before Kenilworth became our publisher, all, or at least a great number of older technical articles were avail-able online. No one seems to know what happened to them, but they probably exist somewhere.
It would be even better if a single master article for each topic were reviewed and updated each time that topic appeared in a new article. For example, rather than have to read twenty articles about how to select glass, a single master article, incorporating the information from the many articles that have been written about it, would address the issue.
Here’s this month’s article. It has a few images, but they shouldn’t be a problem. Note that the first Mr. Wolfe Goes to Washington article is set off both by indenting and by horizontal lines above and below, to make it clear where it starts and ends.
As always, if you find interesting historical photos or docu-ments, please email them to me.
If you go to the convention in Long Beach, look me up!
Sheldon Wolfe