Welcome to the New Look of e-Volunteerism!
The editorial team is delighted to unveil our redesigned Web site as we begin our 11th year of publication.We hope you like both the improved visual appeal and the enhanced functionality that the new site provides.
Since the journal began in 2000 (scroll down to see a screen shot of our very first journal publication), Web publishing has evolved enormously. Colleagues around the world are more at home in this electronic environment, and intuitively understand how things work with far less explanation than was needed 10 years ago. At the same time, people have come to expect attractive and easy-to-use Web sites. We are proud of the e-Volunteerism content, and we believe that the upgrades to the site now represent us in a more engaging and useful way. We hope you agree.
More than Superficial Changes
The key changes that affect readers are summarized on the What’s New page. The changes are far more than cosmetic. The journal content has been converted to a data management system, which allows a far simpler production process and also makes it possible to search for everything by keywords. When you type a word or phrase into the search box, you will no longer get a Google response; the database will be searched internally to find what you want. At the same time, we manually re-indexed every one of the 350-plus articles in the Archives, so you’ll find the Subject Index more consistent and useful, too.
You will also see that a country code now follows the name of every author to show each article’s point of origin. In the revised Country Index, we now only categorize articles under a country if the content is specific to a particular nation. After all, most of the articles in e-Volunteerism are intended to be pertinent across national boundaries; just because a piece was written by an author in Australia, we would not consider it to be “Australian” unless it was about something taking place only in Australia – like the first squad of Muslim surf lifesavers in New South Wales (which you can indeed read about here!).
This Issue
As the content of this issue began to take shape, some themes emerged serendipitously. Laura Hamilton’s article on her adaptation of SurveyMonkey and Mike Bright’s examination of micro-volunteering are examples of innovative uses of technology. Tony Goodrow’s presentation of his expansion of return-on-investment assessments was in hand when Stephen Howlett selected The Economic Value of Volunteering in Queensland to be the focus of this quarter’s Research to Practice section.
We like it when percolating trends surface in the journal this way. So it seemed the perfect time to inaugurate the new Voices section by sharing our voices with you. In this issue, we present audio interviews of the journal’s editorial team as they discuss hot buttons in the volunteer field today that are likely to affect us in the next decade. We realized that most of our readers have never heard us talk, so here we are.
Credit Where Credit Is Due
A huge thank-you goes to Kristin Floyd, the journal’s Web Manager who has been with e-Volunteerism from the beginning (and is also the wizard behind the fantastic Energize Web site and Everyone Ready®, our online training program). She has worked countless hours on the transformation you see here (and on all that you don’t “see”).
Thanks go as well to the rest of the editorial team who contributed feedback and ideas over the last several months, and to several journal readers who responded to our call for an “e-Volunteerism Responder Team” and have been very, very helpful: D.J. Cronin who manages a hospital volunteer force in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia; Jenny Jordan who is with 4-H at the University of Georgia; and Kay Frey who is with RSVP in River Grove, Illinois. You’ve all been great!
All of us wish you happy browsing of the new features and many more years of informative and challenging reading. Please let us know what you think of the redesign, and don’t hesitate to suggest other ways we can improve the journal for you. As always, we would love to generate more collegial discussion throughout each issue and encourage you to post comments (we’ve made the call for responses more visible for you).
Again, here’s What’s New for more detail. And, to acknowledge and remember our roots, here is a screen shot of our very first journal publication, Volume I, Number 1, October 2000. Compare how far we’ve come!
