Joining nations 1947-1990

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PUBLICATIONS AND STANDARDIZATION

PROCEEDINGS

As we have seen, from its inception the IIW has organised sessions for the presentation and discussion of papers. These have been of two kinds - public sessions on specific themes, organised as part of the programme of an Annual Assembly, and colloquia organised by a Commission or Commissions on a subject lying within their terms of reference. The papers presented at colloquia have normally formed part of the archives of the relevant Commissions and have not been published as such. In the early days, the papers presented at public sessions were only available, if at all, as preprints. However, details of the six public sessions organised between 1951 and 1957 are recorded in IIS-IIW 1948-1958. The discussion which took place at the 1958 public session was published by the host delegation while the commercial publisher Elsevier issued in 1961 the entire proceedings of the 1959 session on welding in maintenance and repair. No regular pattern of publication was followed for subsequent public sessions but in general the papers were made available in book form either by the host delegation or by the IIW itself. Since the introduction of the annual international conferences in 1983, the papers presented have been regularly published and marketed by Pergamon Press. WELDING IN THE WORLD From the moment when the Publications Committee was set up in 1956, the possibility of publishing an IIW journal was constantly under consideration. Initially, the idea was turned down, partly on grounds of expense and partly because a bilingual journal would be in competition with those of English and French speaking member societies. An alternative idea was to publish a bulletin of details of those working documents of the Commissions not recommended for publication, but this was also found to be impracticable and it was decided instead to include the abstracts of more of these documents in the Bibliographical Bulletin - a solution which was a forerunner of the current practice of publishing details of the working documents of the Commissions in· Welding in the World. The Governing Council's call.in 1961, in the light of the unsatis– factory financial position, for a fundamental review of policy resulted, among other things, in the submission to the Council in 1962 of detailed proposals for the publication of an IIW quarterly journal