Memberships and Relationships

Aims & objectives

One important objective of ADHO as a whole, and of its membership initiatives as well, must be to increase participation, worldwide, in coordinated scholarly societies for humanities computing. Increasing participation means:

1. increasing the number of regional chapters of ADHO, and providing assistance in recruiting members to those new chapters,
2. increasing membership in existing chapters,
3. increasing members' level of activity in regional chapters

The specific goals of coordinating existing organizations under ADHO should be:

1. to provide new benefits for members of existing organizations that become constituents of ADHO,
2. to provide guidelines for ways in which other organizations can affiliate with ADHO without necessarily becoming full-fledged member organizations or regional chapters,
3. to make it easy and relatively inexpensive for someone who is a member of one regional organization (or affiliate) to become a member of another regional organization,
4. to reduce duplication of administration and activities wherever doing so would not result in a reduction of benefits to members of existing organizations

1. the members of ADHO itself should be its constituent organizations, not the members of those organizations;
2. ADHO would provide benefits to its constituent organizations, and where it provides benefits to individuals, it would do so through the member organizations to which they belong.

Current practice

In current practice, ACH and ALLC are individual membership organizations, with one common benefit of membership: the joint annual conference. Technically, ALLC has institutional members (the institutional subscribers to LLC), but institutional members have no vote. At present, each association also has its own journal, and subscription to the journal is a principal benefit of membership.

In the case of ACH, membership services (including billing and collecting membership fees) are performed by the treasurer, and a substantial portion ($50 of $65) is paid to Kluwer for each journal subscription. Student or emeritus faculty memberships are $55, of which $50 goes to Kluwer. The ACH web site lists the following benefits of membership:

• Subscription to Computers and the Humanities (6 issues per year)
• Reduced registration fee at conferences sponsered by the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing.
• Reduced membership fee in ACH regional affiliate organizations
• Access to ACH-L, a mailing list with announcements of interest to computing humanists and ACH members.
• The intangible benefits derived from associating with others who are interested and involved in humanities computing!

In the case of ALLC, since membership is by way of subscription to LLC, maintenance of the membership list is provided by the journal publisher (Oxford UP, currently) and Oxford and ALLC share the profits on the journal 50/50, including profits on institutional subscriptions. Journal prices are as follows:

	GB Pound	US Dollar
Institutional	141.00	235.00
Personal - includes membership to Association for Literary & Linguistic Computing	49.00	83.00
Personal - Student or Senior Citizen rate	25.00	45.00
Personal - Unwaged rate	25.00	45.00
Membership rate - Institutional for Modern Languages Association	112.80	188.00
Membership rate - Personal for Linguistic Society of America	112.80	188.00

Benefits of membership, beyond subscription to LLC, include: eligibility for project support (annual award of up to 5,000 GBP), eligibility for bursaries (for student members) up to 500 GBP. Student essay prizes (500 GBP) and workshop assistance (2500 GBP) are open to non-members.

STS is a individual membership organization, with basic membership dues at $60. STS has two benefits of membership--a subscription to the print journal TEXT (University of Michigan Press) and participation in the biennial conference. STS offers a joint membership with the European Society for Textual Scholarship, including TEXT and the ESTS journal Variants, for $100, and it offers several more expensive classes of membership for those who wish to support the STS at a higher level (Sustaining Member, for $250, Patron Member, for $500). Students and Retirees have the option of belonging to STS without receiving TEXT, for $15.

TEI and NINCH are institutional membership organizations, with no benefits of membership in common with one another or with ACH or ALLC (although it has been customary for some time now to hold an open meeting for the TEI at the joint annual conference of ACH and ALLC). The fee for membership in TEI and in NINCH is variable, depending on the size of the organization: for TEI, the range is $100/year to $5,000/year, with the average membership fee being about $2,500. For NINCH, the range is $500/year to $5,000/year. NINCH also has a small number of corporate sponsors, at $10,000/year.

NINCH has no tangible benefits of membership, but its "Why You Should Join NINCH" page states:

The benefits of joining NINCH are those of joining a platform where key work is being done to construct a rich "exploratorium" of knowledge and discovery for cultural materials that avoids the pitfalls that would produce a pale and fragmented digital world where works can not be usefully connected or related to other materials, cannot be authenticated or disappear without trace.

TEI members receive one free print copy of the TEI guidelines, and discounts on subsequent copies. TEI also permits individuals as subscribers, but subscribers do not vote as members. Subscribership in TEI costs $50/year. Beyond the guidelines, which are also available in html to non-members, the benefits of membership in the TEI include preferential registration at TEI workshops and training sessions, discounts on software (Peter Robinson's Anastasia is the only product that has so far been proposed for a discount) and soon, discounts on keyboarding services from Apex Data Services.

Range of possibilities

1. Single membership: Under this option, membership would be in ADHO, with two classes of members--individuals and institutions. Benefits of membership would probably vary by type of member.
2. Federated membership: membership in any constituent organization would include a fee (perhaps $20/year) for the constituent organization's ADHO membership. Benefits of membership would be whatever they now are in the constituent organization, plus some central services (banking and book-keeping, renewals, membership lists, etc.) provided by ADHO.
3. No integration of membership: Under this option, membership rolls would be kept separately for all allied organizations, and benefits would be as they now are, with the likely exception of publications, which would be coordinated as described in Geoff Rockwell's discussion of ADHO publications; discounts might be offered to members of one allied organization for memberships in other allied organizations, but there would be no consolidation of membership.
4. Some combination of the above.

Proposals

For ACH and ALLC, it seems clear that it is desirable to consolidate existing journal publishing activities, and equally clear that LLC is the better business platform on which to do that. If membership in ALLC is by subscription to LLC, with the publisher providing membership billing and renewal services, it seems equally clear that ACH would need to consolidate membership at least with ALLC, and at least to the extent of channeling it through LLC subscription--though it would be possilbe and probably desirable to distinguish members of the two organizations in record-keeping, if only to facilitate the distribution of membership/subscription income.

ALLC also has institutional members, but at a much lower cost than TEI or NINCH. Both of those organizations depend on membership income at this higher level to operate, and therefore they could not reduce their membership fees to the level of an ALLC institutional membership. Profit from LLC institutional subscriptions is a significant part of the ALLC's income at present, too, and that means that a common institutional membership that included subscription to LLC and membership in, say, TEI, would have to come at something like the cost of combined TEI/ALLC membership. Both could presumably benefit from having a publisher provide membership billing and renewal services, though.

For STS, it is not clear that consolidating membership with ACH and ALLC would make sense, because it does not seem likely that STS wants to consolidate its journal publishing activities in LLC.

Given all of the above, the most beneficial, least disruptive course of action on membership would seem to be one that included:

1. basic individual membership in ALLC, ACH, or any future regional organizations, by subscription to the ADHO journal (which would be Literary and Linguistic Computing);
2. the option for individuals who were members of ACH, ALLC, or future regional organizations to become subscribers of TEI (or NINCH, if NINCH decided to offer individual subscriberships) at a discount, and those subscribers would be kept track of by the LLC publisher as part of ADHO consolidated membership services. Such subscribers would receive appropriate discounts on TEI or NINCH conference fees;
3. basic institutional membership in ADHO through an institutional subscription to LLC, as ALLC now allows. Institutional subscribers to LLC might be offered a discount on membership in TEI and NINCH--say the same $50 that would be offered to institutional members of TEI or NINCH who wished to subscribe to LLC--but billing for TEI or NINCH membership would be the responsibility of TEI or NINCH, not the LLC publisher;
4. the option for institutional members of TEI and NINCH to get a discounted subscription to LLC (probably the 20% discount listed for the MLA, for example), but TEI and NINCH would keep these membership lists separately, and would do their own billing and renewal;
5. joint membership in ADHO and STS (or other, future, related organizations) and joint subscription at some discounted rate, as STS now does with ESTS;
6. student rates and rates for retired or unemployed individuals as they now are for membership in ALLC;
7. variable subscription rates for individuals and institutions in weaker economies (perhaps using the TEI model, which bases its discounts on the World Bank's classification of world economies, at http://www.worldbank.org/data/databytopic/class.htm)

1. startup packages for local/regional chapters of ADHO, including boilerplates for charter, constitution, and bylaws, recruiting documents, etc.
2. membership services, through the LLC publisher
3. benefits of membership through ADHO, like workshops, a jobs database, conference discounts, etc.
4. tax-free banking services, through ALLC, for collecting profits from publishing activities, membership, and charitable donations, and disbursing them in support of research, teaching, and innovation in humanities computing.

Financial implications

In the plan proposed above, membership rates would rise for ACH members, but stay the same for everyone else. In fact, the implication of the proposals above is that the real consolidation, at an organizational level, would be between ACH and ALLC, with other organizations being more loosely allied, mostly through discounted memberships and subscriptions. This is probably an inevitable outcome, because of the disparity in the size of the budgets of these organizations, and the difference in their missions. TEI is international; NINCH is national. TEI is about maintaining a standard; NINCH aims to provide a crosswalk between cultural organizations on issues of digitization. The annual budgets of TEI and NINCH are both around $250,000/year, and both are underfunded at that level. Combining the two organizations, while maintaining their current missions and activities, would simply result in a larger, but still underfunded, organization. On the other hand, cooperative arrangements (discounts and other considerations) across these organizations would provide tangible benefits of membership for each.

Transition requirements/options

The transition requirements under the plan outlined above are not too onerous:

1. TEI and NINCH Boards would need to agree on a discount for membership, to be offered to ACH/ALLC members, and they would need to comment on the discount in subscription to LLC that would be offered to their members, in return.
2. the STS Board would need to agree to a joint subscription/membership plan with ADHO, on the model of their current arrangement with ESTS.
3. ACH and ALLC would have the most work to do, and a membership committee would need to be designated with representatives from each organization, to finalize the details of a new consolidated membership. This committee would necessarily work closely with the publications committee proposed in Geoff Rockwell's paper, because membership issues and publications are so closely connected.