1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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