day. That is the stenographic transcripts
for the proceedings yesterday which have
been reproduced. I do not know whether
they have yet been collated to be available
for you this afternoon before you leave.
They may be here. If not, they will be sent
to your committee rooms. Again, as soon
as we have sufficient equipment, and in this
we simply underestimated the demand for
the equipment, it will be our attempt to
have the stenographic transcript on your
desks in the committee room early each
morning. As long as the sessions are short,
this will not pose any problem. The reporter
types up the transcript almost immediately.
We will have to have a night crew work-
ing, but they will do so and distribute the
transcripts to you.
These transcripts, as the sessions con-
tinue, are likely to become more and more
bulky, and this will, of course, at times
cause some slowdown in the distribution. In
order to enable you to keep tabs of what
you have, the pages will be numbered con-
secutively, not separately for each session.
The first session, I think, went to page 59;
the second session from page 60 to 88. We
will continue that way so that you can
always tell which, if any, sessions are miss-
ing from your compilation by reference to
the pages.
In order to retain that continuity, there
will be a title page for each session, but it
also will bear the regular page number in
order. In other words, the title page for
the first day, the second session, is page 60.
I do not know what your pleasure is as
to retention and use of these transcripts.
They will, of course, be very interesting
and valuable to you in the future as a his-
torical document, and I am sure you will
want to preserve them. More immediately,
they will be very valuable to you hereafter
as being a record of what is actually said
in debate. The purpose of having the tran-
scripts reproduced, or at least one of the
purposes, is that when committees meet on
a morning following a session in which a
proposal or a question may be debated,
there will be no uncertainty as to what
action was taken by the Convention or by
the Committee of the Whole, or as to what
points were made in the debate. You will
have the stenographic transcript in front
of you. This should expedite the work of
the committees.
I have no doubt that there will be a very
considerable demand for these transcripts.
To a reasonable extent we are planning to
have copies available for public use. We
cannot possibly reproduce enough copies so |
that any member of the public may get one.
They will be made available in libraries and
other places. We are making them avail-
able to the press.
Please let us know if any of you have
any suggestions or thoughts, either as to
distribution, different or wider distribution
of these transcripts, because as all of us
realize, it is absolutely imperative that the
public be kept informed as to exactly what
is being debated and what is being tran-
spired, but also if any of you have any
suggestions as to some method that would
be more convenient for you to keep and use
these transcripts while we are in session.
We have not provided a means because we
are a little puzzled as to what is the best
way to do this. The storage space for the
delegates is at such a premium already
that if we attempted to provide looseleaf
notebooks, each of you would end up with
a great mass of notebooks, which in them-
selves would take up space. One suggestion
is simply to leave them loose and you put
them in envelopes. Another is that we pro-
vide these, what I call shoestring binders,
these big cardboard binders that are ex-
pandable to any degree.
I would suggest that since this a matter
of your own use and the feasibility of dif-
ferent methods, that you give consideration
to a discussion in committee meetings and
any suggestions that you have, pass along
through your administrative assistant or
chairman so that we can work out a method
of handling that will make it of the highest
utility.
Again, let me urge you to safeguard the
transcripts. It will not be possible to re-
produce once we have exhausted whatever
supply is originally reproduced. The time
taken in reproducing the transcripts is con-
siderable, and if we get to a point of trying
to interrupt the production line and go back
to it, we might slow down the work of the
Convention; so please regard those as very
important documents, much more so than
your proposals. It will be much easier for
us to furnish you with additional copies of
proposals. The transcripts are a very val-
uable document.
Now, we are still, as everyone is fully
aware considerably disorganized. We have
not been able to iron out all the problems.
We are woefully short of sufficient, really
competent secretarial help and typewriters.
The staff has not become fully acclimated
on doing the routine things, and accord-
ingly, we have not yet been able to put into
effect what is regarded also as very im-
portant for your use, and that is the two
daily calendars. |
