EDITORIAL
A PLEA FOR MEETINGS OF QUALITY
The value of most meetings of potential interest to literature chemists and information scientists is more a priori promise than a fortiori reality. Possibly this was always so. But in the face of the ever-proliferation of meetings, conferences, seminars, and tutorials, the situation is fast becoming critical. The “information explosion” is barely audible in comparison to the “meeting explosion.” I n subjects ranging from technical writing to computerized information systems, we have the opportunity not only to attend something every day, including some weekends, but to choose among alternatives. This is really overkill. I sometimes wonder whether we spend so much time attending meetings as speaker or listener that no time is left to work on something worth talking about. Don’t misunderstand me. I am not against meetings per se. On the contrary, I think meetings are essential for the communication of scientific research and development and for the interchange of ideas among these who think and do in research and development. The very existence of the Division of Chemical Literature is predicated on its programs a t the National ACS Meetings. These meetings have played, and continue to play an important and necessary role in advancing the art and science of chemical documentation. These meetings have been a profitable source for some of the more meritorious and noteworthy papers for literature chemists, and it is highly probable that some of these papers would not have been written without the incentive of presentation before an audience with whom the author could identify himself and his work. Good audiences are synergistic to good papers, and good organizations are synergistic to the building of a community of scientists that can act as the locus of the best in our profession. The Division of Chemical Literature, through its meetings and continuing leadership, has provided us with a lively sense of being part of a meaningful coalition with common professional goals in chemistry and chemical technology. I t will continue to do so as long as its programs are the product of research and development in all areas of chemical documentation. To relegate its valuable meeting time to papers for the neophyte, or to symposia in well worked-over and trivial subjects, or to tutorial sessions is to become like the hundreds of other meetings that we can attend at will.
146
Journal of Chemical Documentation, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1970
Program chairmen and symposia chairmen have an awesome obligation to their profession, but no obligation to fill a void of one to five days with papers that go nowhere. Symposia chairmen should be selected on the basis of their contributions to and knowledge of the subject area and knowledge of those who have contributed to the subject area of the symposium. I t is all too easy and simple for a program chairman to accept symposia chairmen from among these who are willing, but not necessarily capable, or from among these who, having just discovered chemical documentation or information science, consider what’s new to them as being new to the discipline. Papers that have the greatest impact on the art and science of chemical documentation and on the professional growth of literature chemists are those that report and describe research and development and the implementation of new concepts, new systems, and new services. I do not think that every paper on the program needs to represent a breakthrough, no more than papers do in any of the ACS divisional programs. But I do question the viability of programs in which symposia papers dominate the program. A symposium tends to shape the papers in a program pretty much like a book publisher recruits authors. Consequently, the symposium is essentially authororiented at the expense of relevancy to current accomplishments. All too often the papers in an author-oriented symposium are slight variations on the same theme and cover the same ground as reports already published. How refreshing it would be if a symposium were shaped by the relatedness of submitted papers! This could happen by recruiting papers rather than authors. To recruit papers requires that the program chairman and members of his committee be aware of who is doing what where. It’s almost that simple. An alternative to the dominance of symposia, assuming there is merit to the subject area, is the plenary paper by a recognized authority in the subject area. A onehour plenary paper could be more than a match for an all-day series of 20-minute papers. Furthermore, plenary papers could be an excellent mechanism for recognizing the outstanding contributors to our discipline, a noble objective in itself, and for the involvement of the attendees with the speakers in an extended discussion period. HERMAN SKOLNIK
