Historically, movement by the CJA and most organizations is two steps forward—one step back. In 1993, John Donaldson, who had been thinking deeply about chess and chess history, came to the CJA and spoke about the need to ensure that those interested in chess magazines worked hard and did more than they were doing to ensure that Cleveland preserved the myriad of American chess magazines that were out there.

         A little over 30 years later, Robert Irons stepped down from the VP position as he had too much work to do with him still teaching, etc.  Mark and I made a short list of who we would want to be VP if we could pick.  Jon was on the shortlist, so I reached out to him, and he said he would be willing because he liked many of the projects we were doing and thought they were necessary.

         We were all extremely pleased to have Jon join us.  A few weeks later, Jon shared an email he had received that someone had updated the website for the state of West Virginia, and it had a complete run of all their state periodical issues (a little over 200 of them.)  

        I had not read the brief article in the 1993 Chess Journalist, but some sort of record of the various state affiliates and their journals had been playing around in my brain for a while.  I had once suggested a 30-volume history of chess in the United States to McFarland based on state histories (smaller states grouped), and various state periodicals would be excellent source material.  McFarland was not interested, but this interest in state periodicals had periodically played around in my subconscious.  A couple of years ago, at this meeting, I also briefly mentioned the problem of where and how to find things, though we had yet to come up with a course of action.  On top of this, I had Jon’s kind words about thinking about our projects and his tremendous work in the Gaige archive.

      So, I set up an Excel file and started inputting the names of the various journals in the United States.  The next day, I told Mark and Jon what I had done, and using di Felice, Betts, etc., we began to put together a list of periodicals.  This list is just the first step, though, with about 600 entries.  Meanwhile, I found the above article about Donaldson’s interest, which, as Jon said, “Shows we are definitely on the right track.”  

        While we have yet to solve all the problems, especially those concerning copyright, we have developed a plan of attack.

1.  We have a file with about 600 magazines printed by various clubs, states, and national organizations.
2. We have begun collecting them.  One young man who helps me with various chess projects (it is from some school/donated hours credit thing kids have to do before they graduate) has already begun moving West Virginia over so that we have a copy.  We are also working with a young man to start some copying of materials from the White Collection in Cleveland.
3. We reached out to big pharma, who deals in truly tremendous amounts of data, and spoke with someone who had dealt with electronic documents for about the last two decades; we had them explain the methodology they would use for storing and making the documents accessible, in short – we have designed, at least in theory, how we will set up a folder structure to host these magazines and all papers will be saved within this structure and will have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) done to them so they will be word-searchable.  
4. A list of best practices is currently being written so that those interested in assisting, i.e., someone at a state organization who wants to see more publicity for his state’s magazine, will be able to see the best practices, follow them, and then we can upload it into the folder structure, and it will be accessible to everyone.
5. We will set up a Chessbase file with the games from these issues.  This file will essentially be a game database from all the magazines.  We have some people interested in starting this part of the project.  We also have a couple of people who have begun work on such things and will discuss with them further as the situation allows.

       The hope is that most work will be done in our lifetimes, but there will always be new things to add, new “old” magazines found, and the like.  Still, the expectation is that those who succeed us will continue to expand on our hopes to understand better and respect the great variety of Americans who have played the game and those who have written about chess over the last almost two centuries.