With the next issue of [email protected] Lab we'll be experimenting with some new features, working from suggestions made by readers in our recent email survey.

Easy stuff first: we'll make full-length, unedited pdfs of each story and post a prominent link so the story can be downloaded to hard copy. (Upon request we'll still do edited, two-page pdf "broadsides" like those now available as "[email protected] Selects," but only those you ask for.)  

We'll also offer a library of images. Many original digital photos we use are of print quality, but many other images are, frankly, kludged together from sources like PowerPoint diagrams and pdfs. So quality varies considerably. But any image that's of significantly better resolution than a thumbnail, even if it's not of print quality, we'll put in the library and make available for download.

Before long we'll be expanding our RSS feed service to make each [email protected] Lab story available as soon as it is finished. New issues come out about once every two months, but we accumulate a new story every couple of weeks, on average. Subscribers to our RSS feed service will get those stories immediately. The full issue will have the extras too, like the pdfs and image library.

Looking a little further out, we hope to do podcasts of all the main stories in [email protected] Lab. No frills at first -- no music or effects, and minimal sound editing. In the beginning it will just be an audio version of the story itself, once we've acquired a good digital recorder and software. We'll see where we can go from there.

And just who is "we?" Regular writers for [email protected] Lab include Lynn Yarris, Paul Preuss, and Dan Krotz in Berkeley Lab's Communications Department, and Allan Chen in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division. We get contributions from David Gilbert of the DOE Joint Genome Institute, Jon Bashor and Cecilia Wang in Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences, and writers from other departments too. In the Creative Services Office (CSO), Erik Richman is our web developer, Roy Kaltschmidt is our photographer, and Eva Cohen did the original [email protected] Lab design. Reid Edwards heads the Lab's Public Affairs Office, Ron Kolb heads the Communications Department, and Cheryl Ventimiglia heads CSO. Once we feel official enough, we'll be putting all this info in a masthead.

— Paul Preuss, Editor, [email protected] Lab