It is hard to believe that NCAW is entering its decennial year. Next February, 2012, we’ll celebrate our tenth anniversary! As we plan for the second decade, our goal is to take greater advantage of the possibilities of online publishing. Although NCAW is still, for the most part, a paper journal published online, we have done some things that are impossible in paper publishing, such as linking to other sites and allowing our authors almost unlimited flexibility in the length of their articles and the number of illustrations they can use. But much more can be done in making NCAW a new kind of journal, one that is richer and more exciting than traditional journals published on paper.

In the future, we’d like to publish articles that take full advantage, in meaningful ways, of the technological possibilities of electronic publishing. An author writing on the relationship of visual art to music or cinema might include fragments of musical compositions or films to illustrate his/her point. Articles on architecture might include streaming video to give the reader a clearer notion of a space or building to which the author refers. And the illustration of a painting, accompanying a text in which the analysis of surface texture is important, may include an option to zoom in on the brushwork.

To do this we need you, the author, as much as we need the talents of our wonderful web designer Emily Pugh. You need to come up with new ideas, and we’ll try to realize them. So, as you are thinking about submitting an article to NCAW, think outside the box, or, rather, think outside the paper journal format and imagine what an online article can be.