2006   Volume 9 Issue 3  Visitor Studies Today

VST Publications

An announcement to VSA members, Visitor Studies Today readers and contributors from John Fraser, VSA Vice President for Programs and David Anderson, Chair of the Publication Committee 
We are pleased to announce a major new VSA initiative. Since our founding as an Association, we have relied on our publications to advance the field, and sales of our original print publications have been stable over the last twenty years! However, as the digital age has emerged, many academics, new professionals and students have turned to the internet to search for the founding literature in our field. A new opportunity has opened up to our Association that will secure the legacy of our shared efforts and help new professionals learn of the seminal writing in the field. Through a joint effort of the Visitor Studies Association and the University of PittsburghÕs UPCLOSE InformalScience.org, supported by funding from the National Science Foundation, we are now able to reprint the content of the Visitor Studies Association archive digitally and to make these reprints available online and without cost.
We are pleased to announce with this issue of Visitor Studies Today, that we will be reprinting all issues of the following journals, proceedings and abstracts as part of an online archive. Because our archive represents the work of a great many of the leaders in our field, we are also using this announcement to let our authors know that their work will be reprinted for digital access. ÊThe new online archive will make all of the following available:
1.	Visitor Behavior, 12 volumes of 4 (later 2) issues (1986Ð1997)
2.	Visitor Studies Today, 9 volumes of 3 issues (1998Ð2006)
3.	Visitor Studies: Theory, Research and Practice, Volume 1Ð9 (1988Ð1996)
4.	VSA Conference abstracts (1997 Ð 2006)
This new partnership will allow readers, researchers and practitioners to find their way to the archives through both www.visitorstudies.org and www.informalscience.org within the coming year. This new archive will also allow people to search the text of these articles through many of the online search engines. In many cases, keywords for articles were not part of our original publications, but our publications committee has committed to make the work accessible to a larger audience by creating a keyword project to help increase the utility of that effort. If anyone is interested in helping to build these keywords for the archives, please e-mail David Anderson (David.Anderson@ubc.ca).
We are also pleased to announce that Dr. Chandler Screven, editor of Visitor Studies Bibliography and Abstracts, has kindly given his authorization for the Visitor Studies Association to digitally reprint the 4th edition of this publication online. Chan, as he is known to his many friends, has been a major contributor to the field of visitor studies for over 40 years and has a long-standing commitment to the wider dissemination of our work. This valuable resource will be available online at www.visitorstudies.org in 2007. Chan is currently at work on a 5th edition, which we plan to publish in 2007 or 2008 under the new title ScrevenÕs Visitor Studies Bibliography and Abstracts. 
Finally, based on the incredible depth of our archives, the Visitor Studies Association has also recently entered into a very favorable agreement with a professional publisher to take over publication and distribution of our peer-reviewed journal, Visitor Studies Today. Starting with Volume 10, we will be retitling the journal to Visitor Studies, moving to two issues a year and for the first time, making the journal available by subscription in print, electronic or both. Subscription will be a member service that is provided to each member of our Association or available online through Routledge. Authors publishing in any issue starting with Volume 10 will receive a discount on the purchase of any Routledge publication in the year that their article appears.
Thank you to all who helped build the field of visitor studies.