Abstract
This issue marks the end of a century-long era. Since the first issue in 1914, print copies of Music Educators Journal and her predecessors were distributed widely—first to “all persons interested in the teaching of public school music” and later to all dues-paying members of the professional association now known as the National Association for Music Education. 1 Today’s MEJ is the world’s oldest and most widely distributed print journal in the field of music education.
Music Educators Journal has been published by SAGE Publications for nearly eight years. One of the advantages of SAGE’s involvement has been the online, digital distribution of our journal “to individuals and libraries worldwide” as “one of the member benefits” of the association. 2 All MEJ content from Volume 1 onward has been digitally accessible to members since the 2008 transition to SAGE. Beginning in March 2016, membership dues will include receipt of MEJ content in digital form; receipt of the print version will require an annual subscription of $20.
NAfME members have received several announcements about this transition. The primary e-mail announcement noted the cost savings while promising that “future issues will make use of the possibilities that come with digital distribution to expand MEJ’s online capabilities to include sound files, video, and other digital resources to provide a new experience.” 3 MEJ’s editors and Editorial Committee are eager to move forward toward realizing these possibilities in the scholarly, peer-reviewed content of our membership journal.
In 2012 and again in 2014, MEJ’s Editorial Committee offered unanimous support for such a transition, but all discussions involved a hypothetical, future shift. The implications of the augmented format possibilities (“sound files, video, and other digital resources”) and their impact on MEJ’s scholarly content have not been fully vetted, nor have guidelines been established for their submission to the journal. This will be the primary work of the Editorial Committee in coming months.
In April 2015, I asked members of the Editorial Committee to offer NAfME leadership a glimpse of MEJ’s potential future by recommending academic journals that are considered to be successes in digital form. Among these were Music Theory Online (cited by 80 percent of Editorial Committee members for use of media files and embedded web objects), International Journal of Education and the Arts (use of videos), and Ubiquity: The Journal of Literacy, Language, and the Arts (use of mixed media across art forms).
I am optimistic that the possibilities of digital MEJ content will be realized in coming months and that potential contributors will be offered clear guidelines that ensure academic rigor. MEJ has assumed a leadership role in demonstrating how scholarship—research, theory, and philosophy—can be reflected in the teaching of music in classrooms throughout the United States and, increasingly, across the globe. The upgrade of our journal’s content capabilities from print-based to a full embrace of “digital and online” is important and, perhaps, overdue. However, removing the print edition from the hands of NAfME members would be a disservice if there were no practical enhancement to the digital and online content that is already available.