6.4 Appendix e: survey of art history editors

During the focus group with art and architectural history editors held at the College Art Associationconference on February 22, 2006, the editors in attendance agreed to participate in a follow-up survey to gather more specificinformation about art history publishing at their presses. A six-page survey was developed, requesting information from editorson the following topics: the subject area(s) in which they work, the volume and nature of the titles published by their press in artand architectural history, submissions and the review process, publication costs, sales and print-run trends, and electronicpublishing.

Surveys were sent by email to 22 editors. A total of 17 completed surveys were returned–12 by editors at university presses, 5 by editors at trade presses. The twelveuniversity press editors who responded represent most of the larger academic publishers of art and architectural history works. Theaggregated responses of these 12 respondents can be taken as generally indicative of the editorial practices at universitypresses with significant commitments to publishing in the area of art and architectural history, but they should not be consideredrepresentative of university presses in general.

Because the number of surveys returned by editors at trade presses was too small to permit meaningfulgeneralizations, they were not included in the analyses carried out for this report.

A copy of the questionnaire with aggregated findings, based on the twelve university presses that responded,can be found on the following pages. For questions that can be answered with numerical answers [such as question 4:“How many new titles have been published in your subject area (arthistory-related titles only) during the past five years?”], thearithmetic average of all valid responses is provided (in this case, 85). To illustrate the amount of variation present in theresponses to particular questions, the range of responses to each question (from lowest to highest) is also provided.

• Survey--Art and Architecture History Editors