A message from the editor
If you are coming to this post after having read Alister’s message (A message from Alister and the Deposits team), you will know why the team at Deposits has decided to move the magazine online. While it is a shame that this has had to be done so suddenly, I believe it will actually provide us with a great opportunity to make our offering to you even better. And I hope the changes to the website that you can see makes you as enthusiastic as I am.
A library of articles
In this respect, I have finished creating a database of the articles and book reviews that have been published by Deposits magazine. Incredibly, I have discovered that there are currently about 840 such articles, which are eminently suitable for digital publication. Of these, we have published over just under 400 of them online (together with a few completely new articles).
This means there is a huge supply of unpublished articles, which we aim to publish in full over the coming months and years. And, even though I edited most of them, I had forgotten just how excellent and informative they are. In this way, not only will Deposits Online be a source of new and fascinating articles, it will also become a library of articles for amateurs, students and professionals alike to use in any way they like.
Finding the articles
Obviously, this means that we need a more flexible way of presenting and finding articles on the subjects you are interested in. To this end, Alister has been working to change the look of the website and provide new tools to help you find articles. He has provided a new suite of categories to reorganise Deposits Online, to group related articles together and to help you to find information. You will see on the left-hand side of the home page a list of categories including Earth Sciences, Urban and Human, Interests, Locations and Book Reviews. Clicking on any of these reveals sub-categories. In this way, we hope that you will begin to understand the huge range of articles that we have published.
And, if you have signed up for email alerts, these will continue to alert you that something new has been published.
The next task will be to reorganise the tags for each article, but that is for another day …
Book reviews, short articles and news
Deposits has always worked closely with publishers, and book reviews will continue to be provided free to all. These will be published across a wide range of social networking sites, to give publishers and authors as much promotion as possible, while acknowledging the current challenging conditions of physical media.
Likewise, small shorter articles and news related blogs (which we hope to reinstate in the coming weeks as a regular feature) will also all be available to all subscribers and non-subscribers.
We have also included a glossary, to which technical terms in articles have been linked, to provide short explanations to help you understand what you read.
Integrating the sites
In the past, Deposits has used features from our other sites. UK Fossils will continue to be kept updated with location guides and UKAFH will continue to publish its detailed event reports. Our popular discussion forum will also continue as a great way to share your own finds and ask questions. We have always linked these resources together and we will look to further enhance this integration. For example, there is now a direct link from the home page to UK Fossils (on the horizontal, red menu at the top), which contains guides, locations and news about UKAFH fossil hunts.
For all subscribers, the full back catalogue of 60 issues in their PDF form will continue to be available to download (under Downloads).
Finally, the future of an online magazine offers new and existing future options, such as moving into video and interactive features, something we have never been able to consider until now.
Please let me know what you think using the Contact page and I hope you enjoy Deposits Online as we take it forward into its next phase.
Jon Trevelyan
Editor – Deposits