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Glen N. Williams |
To All OES Members –
Welcome to the Oceanic Engineering Society in 2000!
1999 was a very good year for the OES with a quite successful OCEANS ’99 MTS/IEEE Conference in Seattle, Washington, under the General Chairmanship of Dr. Robert Spindel. Bob has been active in both the OES and MTS for many years, having also chaired OCEANS’89, another outstanding meeting in the OCEANS Conference series.
Some of you may be wondering why you’re still getting the hard copy version of the OES Newsletter. I had previously announced that the Winter 1999 issue was the last OES Newsletter to be printed hard copy, and that all Newsletters from the 2000 Spring issue forward would be Web based for electronic access by OES members. Since that announcement, I have had opportunities to speak to many members, and the message came through loud and clear that they felt that it’s a bit premature to do away with the hard copy version totally. The members strongly supported the move to electronic delivery of the Newsletter, but were not supportive of that being the only Newsletter medium. Therefore, for the foreseeable future, the OES will continue to publish the Newsletter in both hard copy form as well as the Web based electronic version, with the hard copy version delivered to all OES members, and electronic notification of the Web publication to those OES members for whom we have email addresses.
At OCEANS’99 MTS/IEEE I also announced that the OES was going to archive our intellectual property on CDROM. Current plans are for all issues of the Journal of Oceanic Engineering and most of the Proceedings of the OCEANS Conferences to be archived and retrievable via an industry standard search engine. The Proceedings and the early Journals, from inception through 1995, will be in shadowed PDF form, while the Journals from 1996 through 1999 will be in SGML tagged form. IEEE Corporate is acting on OES’s behalf in contract negotiations, since other societies either already have or soon will undertake the same archiving process with their intellectual property, and could possibly use the same contractor services. The cost of this OES CD Archive Set will be nominal for OES members, and scaled up appropriately for non-OES and non-IEEE members. Also, I have been promised that the CD Set will be available for purchase at OCEANS ’00 MTS/IEEE in Providence, RI in September 2000.
IEEE has also opened up the XPLORE electronic publishing archive to IEEE society member use. The later OES Journals are also in that data base in SGML tagged form. To keep the OES costs for the CDROM project above, as well as later additions to XPLORE, in a responsible range, data bases and other previously developed archives will be utilized in both of these projects.
Don’t forget… The OES has two conferences coming up in the near future.
And
To all OES student members – Check the OCEANS’00 Web Site in June or so for additional information about some new student activities planned for Providence…
I will end on a recruiting note… The OES needs some more volunteers… We have an awfully good group to work with, but we also have a lot of opportunities for members to get involved and give something back to their profession. If you have any questions about our activities, either on a professional level or an administrative level, please contact me at g-williams@tamu.edu, or 979.845.5485.
Glen N. Williams