Message from the Chair
Abstract
One of the issues that we have heard from past chairs is the problem of decreasing membership. We have discussed why we are losing members and what we can do to increase our numbers. One avenue has been to look at the community colleges and encourage those faculty to join our ranks.
As Chair, I would like to address a different yet related problem. That problem is the diminishing number of articles submitted and deemed acceptable for the Engineering Design Graphics Journal. The Engineering Design Graphics Journal is one of the oldest continuing ASEE division publications. Our earlier members saw the importance of having a quality publication which had Engineering Graphics as its forum. Since the early 1980's, the Journal has been a refereed publication with a distinguished panel of reviewers. Unfortunately, like our membership, submission to the Journal has begun to lag. We are getting fewer articles submitted to the Journal and of those many are rejected for a variety of reasons.
Just as it is time to expand our membership, it is time to expand our graphics horizons. We must accept new aspects of graphics, new teaching methods, and new technologies for using and preparing graphics. These might include multimedia, hypermedia, digital color, and simulations as well as descriptive geometry, CAD< and other traditional engineering graphics topics.
Judy Birchman, Director of Publications for the Engineering Design Graphics Division and editor of the Journal, has proposed the addition of a New Technology for the EDG Journal. As with all other articles published in the Journal, the members of the EDGJ Review Board will review the technology articles. We expect these articles to uphold the same high standards as all other published articles.
BUT... we will ask the reviewers to broaden their scope of who our readership might be. This is critical, although it is rather like the chicken or the egg enigma. If we continue to maintain a rigid narrow scope and vision of what topics might be of interest to our readers then we are in effect limiting our readership to those who are interested in the traditional version of engineering graphics. We need to expand our vision and our scope to include new graphic technologies that we can use in our graphics classes and/or methods that we can apply to our classes. Just as in the past, not all of us have been totally enthralled or interested in a paper that was full of formulas, not everyone will have the same enthusiasm for some of the new technology graphics. However, we can still provide a forum for both types of papers and both types of readers. The inclusion of these different topics can benefit the division twofold. First, we will add new and informative topics to the Journal, and second, we might find new contributors and possibly future members who will have much to offer the division.
The Engineering Design Graphics Journal is a publication and a tradition that we should be proud of. When Gary Bertoline was chair he called upon the membership to do all they can to see that we are a viable organization 50 years from now. My hope is that along with the organization, we will also continue to have a thriving journal in the year 2050.
