ACH Membership Report
Over the past six months, there has been increased communication with Oxford University Press regarding membership numbers for ACH, and any arising membership issues. LLC's representative at OUP has changed to Trish Thomas, Executive Editor of US Humanities Journals, who is based in the USA. Trish has provided us with various membership reports and statistics, and is liaising with both ALLC and ACH in order for us to understand the membership we have, solve any quirks of becoming a member, raise any concerns we have about membership issues, and, ultimately, aid us in recruiting more members of ACH and subscribers to LLC.
Personal Subscribers to LLC as of May(?) 2006
| ACH Personal Memberships | 62 |
| ACH Junior | 5 |
| ACH Other | 3 |
| Joint Personal | 27 |
| Joint Junior | 10 |
| ALLC Personal | 62 |
| ALLC Junior | 9 |
| ALLC Other | 1 |
There are some areas of error in the membership data which need to be checked;
- It is not clear when the snapshot date for subscriptions was, or how long these take to go through the system.
- There are some members who appear as lapsed members, who claim to be fully paid up.
- Joint memberships. There are some errors in the membership data regarding individuals who may belong to both ALLC and ACH but who only appear in the data as being members of one of the institutions. This is known through anecdotal reports: how we verify the membership of individuals when there are known errors is something which has to be revisited with OUP.
As a result, we need to clarify the nature of the data more closely with OUP in order to gain a complete picture of our membership, and the above figures should only be taken as an indicative guide.
Institutional Memberships (2005):
There are 1213 Institutions worldwide who subscribe to LLC. 890 were subscribed to consortium packages (online only), 24 received free online access as they were in a developing country, 17 had online only institution memberships, 113 had print and online institutional memberships, and 169 had print only institutional memberships.
Lapsed subscribers
There are, on file, details of 139 lapsed subscribers to the journal, whose membership has lapsed at some point since 2000. This includes 6 officers or council members of ACH! (although they may have subsequently paid their yearly subscription, and the data may not be complete, as stated above. However, if members of the executive are not paid-up members, this may have constitutional implications. All council members and officers are therefore asked to check their own status as members). These 139 individuals could be contacted, in the first instance, to be reminded of the existence of the association(s), and encouraged to rejoin the journal?
Attracting New Members
There is also rich potential for attracting new members from conference attendees who are not already members (raising the conference fee for non-members, as happened this year, may encourage subscription), and from those who have attended previous conferences, been published in LLC, or submitted to LLC. If a membership drive were to be undertaken, this should be the first group of people approached.
Other Membership Issues
Various membership issues have been reported, including:
- Problems in switching from being a member of one of the organisations to being a joint member in both
- Problems in the application form: depending on the version, it can be unclear which organisation you are signing up to be a member of
- The facility to have direct debit for non UK based members is not available
- In the new OUP contract, it is stipulated that LLC subscribers are entitled to 10% off OUP publications, but it is not known how to get access to this discount
These issues need to be revisited with OUP to ensure that becoming a member of ACH is not an arduous process and that members get the benefits they are entitled to.
Therefore, further discussions need to be undertaken with OUP to understand and verify the data, and rectify problems which have been reported by members. ACH needs also to decide a strategy in encouraging lapsed members to rejoin the organisation, and to encourage new subscribers to join.
Melissa, June 26, 2006