One of the advantages of being a newsletter editor is that you can join the STC Editor's forum. This is where latest newsletters from other chapters are circulated, so you have a chance to see what other chapters are doing and to read everyone else's articles.

There's a great exchange of articles within the STC and many are republished by other chapters. This is good for authors, as it increases the readership of articles and gets their names known. We were delighted to find that two recent STC UK articles have been republished elsewhere: Kim Schrantz's "Life on the Continent is like Breakfast" went into the Feb issue of "Rough Draft", the Phoenix Chapter's newsletter, and David Farbey's article on Survey Monkey was republished in the February Online SIG newsletter.

Having a pool of articles to draw on is great resource for editors, too. And sometimes someone writes an article that provides the perfect solution to your own authoring problem. Cathy found this when she read "Copernic Desktop Search" by David Coverston from the Orlando chapter (Memo to Members, Feb 2006, pp 12-13). "I need a search tool that can locate text within documents on a network drive. David's article says that Copernic Desktop Search can do just this, and what's more it's free! We're now investigating whether it can help our installation engineers!" We're reproducing David's article in our own 'Tools, Tips and Websites' section .

Of course, anything you write for the STC UK Chapter's newsletter could end up being republished by another chapter, too. So, how about sending your contribution in?

Cathy and Poornima

newsletter@stcuk.org