Reviewing the concept of the UNECE Statistical Yearbook Tiina Luige, Juraj Riecan UNECE Statistical Division Work Session on Statistical Dissemination and Communication 14-15 February 2005, Henley-on-Thames, United Kingdom

Reasons for reviewing the concept Increasing availability of UNECE statistical databases on the web macroeconomic housing gender transport General UN policy favouring electronic to paper dissemination documents, publications, … Resource constraints Increasing availability of statistical databases on the web (gender, housing, macroeconomic, transport) Gender and housing on Internet, macroeconomic to be there by 18 February In these conditions what is the added value of a publication? General UN policy of reducing paper documentation A question of general environment - Page limits reduced all the time; Requirement to review the publication programmes and cut down; On the other hand the relevance of UNECE statistics has to be proved by publishing more data Resource constraints Trends were always published using “extra” resources, which are no longer available Internal resources have also decreased

Considerations Contents - how extensive There is an audience for such kind of a product Wide range of topics appreciated Requires a lot of resources to produce Format: paper, Internet (database or Excel), CD-ROM The promotional role of the paper format – Mini-Trends What is primary – electronic or paper version? Possibilities offered by electronic media – e.g. maps, interactive graphs No decision yet Midi-Trends (+ CD-ROM) experiment in 2005 Contents to limit to data that is available in-house or to collect additional data if limited to in-house data, should cut the topics by half, then not a logical selection Format Mini-Trends as a by-product of the big publication – relatively easy to produce Liked by the users and by ECE management If the publication would be stopped altogether, we would still have to do the Mini-Trends which would be much more work

Some questions on the future of publications What is a publication? speak about dissemination products instead distinguish from a simple data access Paper format has its advantages … and its faithful readers To have a system of products finding the right combination of paper, electronic, ready-made tables, access to databases, graphs, maps, etc. primary a (common) database, all other products outputs from this Paper products fewer, slimmer and nicer What is a publication? The notion of publication was extended from paper to electronic publications (CD-ROM, websites,…) ready-made selection, specific release date, clearly specified content, common visual design, a package with simultaneous use of different presentation formats consider products instead – however, probably a simple database access will not be still admitted in this group Paper format has its advantages screen is not comfortable for reading, often the electronic publications are printed out paper more comfortable to work with – can make notes on paper, will not get lost easier archiving on the other hand we should admit that the great advantage of electronic products is that they provide search and browsing capabilities To have a system of products the access point from Internet should be stable! integrating the paper and electronic products (standalone and Internet) Paper products fewer, slimmer and nicer paper will not disappear but it has its specific audience should be more targeted to this audience more storytelling and picture-showing more flashy, attractive, using graphs, maps, pictures draw attention to particularly interesting findings more analysis can serve as a pointer to more information (in databases, on websites, etc., etc.) more generally this can be extended to all standalone products (printed, CD ROM, …), as they are in the same position in relation to the Internet