Nine years ago, I served on the old Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) Pamphlet Commission. We were the ones responsible for producing all the pamphlets for the denomination. Back then, the World Wide Web was still new and shiny and full of untapped potential. During my time on the Commission, I said we should offer the text of all pamphlets for free on the UUA Web site. This idea provoked strong opposition, both from other members of the Commission, and from UUA staff.
People said, “If we offered them for free, we wouldn’t be able to sell printed versions.” I said, “So what? The point of a pamphlet is to reach as many people as possible. We’ll reach more people online.” People said, “But if we offer them for free, congregations will print them up on their own printers.” I said, “So what if they do? Some small congregations can’t afford pamphlets any other way, and they’re the ones who need the pamphlets most. The congregations who can afford pamphlets will find that our printed versions look so much better that it will be worth it to purchase them.” People said, “But what about copyright?” I said, “Not a real issue. You retain copyright, but put a notice offering permission of any Unitarian Universalist congregation to print as many as needed.”
Finally, I tried to make my real point. I said, “This is not about printed materials at all! We should be concerned about making our pamphlets easily available on this shiny new medium, the World Wide Web.” But I was ignored.
Then the Pamphlet Commission was dissolved, and UUA staff took over producing pamphlets. And lo and behold, suddenly one day the full text of all the pamphlets was available online. Hooray! We did the right thing for once!
Well. Sort of….
Just now I went to the UUA Web site to try to find a pamphlet online so I could send the URL to a newcomer to our church who wanted to know more about Unitarian Universalism. But apparently the texts of most of our pamphlets are no longer available on the UUA Web site (or if available, so hard to find that they might as well be unavailable). And when the text of a pamphlet was available, said text was accompanied by a long and nasty-sounding copyright notice. (Update: Chris found the old pamphlets page archived here. Thanks, Chris!)
I’d love to be proved wrong on this (Update: Deb proves me wrong here — Deb has long been a strong advocate for making pamphlets freely available on the Web. Yay, Deb!). I’d love to have someone show me the easily accessible Web page where I can find texts for every current UUA pamphlet, so I can share those pamphlets with our newcomers. I’d love it if every UUA pamphlet came with a Creative Commons 3.0 (by-nd-nc) license, so I could freely reproduce the texts of pamphlets on our church Web site.
And if someone can’t prove me wrong — if UUA pamphlets are mostly available only as dead tree resources — then maybe it’s time to gather a group of people who actually understand new media, a group that would write and produce free online pamphlets (text, audio, video) under a Creative Commons license.
I had wondered about this back a few months ago when I was hungry for information on UUism and searching the web–cinluding the UUA site of course–for reading material. I did eventuyaly get a bunch of pamphlets at the church, but I couldn’t understand why they weren’t available online. It didn’t seem to me that selling the pamphlets would be a real for-profit venture for the UUA but rather a service they could provide given that printing them up in larger batches saves money in the long run.
Having the full text of the pamphlets easily available online would have been a great bounty to somebody like me who was all full of wanting information. And I ended up becoming a member, which is what I assume they want more of. The best thing I managed to find was a full text PDF of the 100 Questions book.
I’m sorry about my typos up there. *facepalms*
I would love to be part of a project like this — we don’t have nearly the number of truly accessible resources we could, and the looong, slooooow process of uua.org’s redesign and content migration is making things worse. Like you say, the content might be there somewhere, but it’s impossible to find.
The old pamphlet index appears to still be available, if not directly linked anywhere…
http://archive.uua.org/pamphlet/pamphlets.html
embroiderama @ 1 — …and the 100 questions book is not a UUA pub.
Jess @ 3 — “we don’t have nearly the number of truly accessible resources we could” — which may be the most important point of all, that we simply need more.
Chris @ 3 — Thanks, that’s what I was looking for! Maybe it will get migrated to the new site eventually.
the 100 questions is also not a great indicator of the whole UU-ism, just one part of it.
the whole mind set of not wanting to give pamphlets away (online) is disturbing. Glad to hear you fighting for this back then,….
One of the things I wish we UUs did was a daily email – based on the concept of the devotionals that most denominations do – (from Methodists to even the Sweedborgians) ….
Normally, I don’t sign on to say, “That’s right!” But in this case, this is so right. Humans have the strangest instinct to resist sharing the thing they want more people to know about.
Ooh! Can I help?
Video pamphlets… love it! Go Go Grassroots UU TV!
Dan,
You said, “I’d love to be proved wrong on this. I’d love to have someone show me the easily accessible Web page where I can find texts for every current UUA pamphlet, so I can share those pamphlets with our newcomers.”
Happy to do that. If you visit UUA.org and select “publications” from the “I Am Interested In…” dropdown menu, you’ll be taken to a page containing a link (under “denominational connections” for pamphlets. Click that link and yes indeed, there’s a page with a link to the text of nearly every pamphlet
(http://www.uua.org/publications/pamphlets/index.shtml)
— the newest ones might not yet be linked but otherwise, they’re there, free and public.
And there’s another easy way to find the pamphlets: If you visit the point of sale for the print pamphlets, the UUA’s bookstore site (http://www.uuabookstore.org/) you can navigate to ‘pamphlets’ or type in the name of the particular pamphlet you want. Either way, you should get a link to the pamphlet, info on it, a way to purchase it, and a link so that you can read the text.
While the current text link takes you to our old website — and yes, we’re still moving content from the old site to the new site — the text is there. And soon, we expect that the pamphlet text will be in pdf form (and not on the old site), linked from the bookstore site.
I hope this helps answer your questions!