IPEd Notes March 2010
Big news to start 2010: our South Australian colleagues have offered IPEd an open-ended, interest-free loan of $5,000 to redesign and reorganise the content of the IPEd website. The IPEd Council has accepted this very generous and welcome offer. Upgrading the website to improve its functionality and better reflect the purport, aims and aspirations of our profession has been a project on the council’s agenda for some time, but its implementation has been, until now, impeded by a shortage of the wherewithal to do so. The work is now under way, managed by IPEd’s Communication Committee (CommComm) headed by Rowena Austin (SA). In consultation with councillors and other interested parties, the committee has drafted a site map and is seeking expressions of interest from web-design firms familiar with the needs of professional associations.
Another current CommComm project is the production of a brochure designed primarily to promote to employers the use of professional editors. The text of the brochure has been finalised and a designer is now being sought. Copies of the finished product will be distributed to our member societies. It should prove to be a useful tool for individual editors as well as for corporate promotion activities.
IPEd has produced its first ‘annual’ report, which covers the period between its incorporation on 22 January 2008 and 30 June 2009. The report can be found on the IPEd website and the member societies have been asked to distribute it with their newsletters. This first report gives details of the establishment of the company in addition to annual financial and operational information, and lists the achievements of the period covered.
All aspects of the 2009 IPEd accreditation exam, held on 12 September last, have now been finalised. A detailed report on the exam can be found on the website. No exam will be held during 2010, but the Accreditation Board has begun work on the 2011 exam, including research into the possibility of an onscreen option.
Over the Christmas – New Year holiday period, IPEd-appointed adjudicators Stephanie Holt (Vic.) and Virginia Wilton (Canberra) completed judging of the sixteen books entered for the 2009 Barbara Ramsden Award for excellence in editing and made their recommendation to the award committee. The award is a major literary prize for a book in any field of literature. It is a joint activity of the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW) and IPEd, and recognises the contributions of both author and editor to the final work. The name of the winning book remains secret until announced by FAW. We’ll let you know when the cat is out of the bag. The list of books from which the winner was chosen is on the IPEd website.
During the IPEd national conference in Adelaide in October 2009, Pam Hewitt (NSW) collected data for her latest national survey of editors, this one being the fifth. The data from the 89 respondents indicated, among other things:
• a possible movement back to in-house editing and away from freelancing
• a reduction in usage of the terms editor, copyeditor and substantive editor in favour of, for example, project manager, communications manager and writing consultant
• the emergence of professional development as a clear first priority for editors
• an increase in the reported national average hourly rate to $66, up a modest $4 an hour since the 2007 survey.
Read the full report.
The next IPEd national conference will be in Sydney next year with our colleagues in the Society of Editors (NSW) as our hosts. The IPEd seed fund of $2,000 to help support the planning and organising of the national conferences has now been transferred from SA to NSW.
The IPEd Council is exploring the possibility of creating a peer-reviewed ‘IPEd Occasional Papers’ series with the aim of encouraging editors and those working in editing-related fields to share their ideas, views and reflections on editing as theory, as practice and as a profession. All such papers would of course be good, but the best of them might warrant special presentation at, for example, our national conferences. Feedback on the proposal, via your society’s councillor, would be welcome.
Ed Highley
Secretary
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