As I was searching the preliminary program book for the SBL Annual Meeting looking for interesting sessions, all of a sudden I reached a page saying, “The Preliminary Program is Not Yet Available.” Hmmm. It was linked on many blogs yesterday, so apparently the folks at SBL noticed the heightened traffic and shut it down. Was it a leak? Was some blogger experimenting with the website URL (it’s just the same as other program book websites with the meeting ID #15)? In fact, if you look back at the program books from previous years, the same message appears! “The Preliminary Program is Not Yet Available.”
An intriguing mystery! Perhaps not quite as scandalous as Amazon’s recent “Lesbian” tag mishap.
Update: Thanks to Jorwed for pointing out this updated post on the Evangelical Textual Criticism blog:
Update: I have removed the contents of this post including comments because Matthew Collins of the SBL asked me to do so. Apparently, the program book is not linked from any part of the SBL site and anyone who has announced the page has done so in error, since SBL has not announced it. I am very sorry for this, I got the link from another biblioblogger, and it was never my intention to do something offensive.
Hmmm. This gives me an ethical dilemma. Michael Collins has not contacted me to ask me to take down my post, but does this announcement ethically obligate me to do the same? My own post is not a list of many sessions, but a look into the people with whom I am presenting in only one session.
I’d rather not take it down, but I suppose I will say that if he contacts me and tells me that it is harmful in some way for me to leave my post up, then I will temporarily take it down. It’s not like SBL is some big corporate entity on an intimidation campaign. I have tremendous respect for the organization and have even served as a student representative for SBL. So, I will leave it at that for now.
This (at least partly) explains what’s going on: http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/04/sbl-2009-annual-meeting-preliminary.html
Dear Patrick, I think it was strange that the SBL made the program available even if they did not provide the link. I got the link from Nijay Gupta’s blog and had no idea that SBL took offense, especially not since the page indicated “preliminary program book”. I contacted Collins myself because I found an error in the program, and then he asked me how I could have searched the program, and he asked me to remove it. I just left a brief explanation on my blog, since others link to the post. In the end, I am glad that the SBL restricted access to the page if they don’t want the information to come out. I have the same respect as you for the organization and I am a chair of a program unit at the ISBL.
See you in New Orleans!
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification, Tommy. That makes sense. So, Collins is not contacting bloggers in general, but simply responding to one blogger who contacted him.
At least we know now why they locked it down.
See you in The Big Easy!
I imagine that SBL doesn’t want people to be drawing conclusions about when they will be presenting and with whom from a preliminary program book because if there are any changes made, there is a high risk of confusion. Probably they made a mistake in putting it up so that it was in a publicly accessible part of the site rather than simply being accessible to people whose role it was to check that it looked OK. They assumed that since it wasn’t actually linked from the main site, people wouldn’t be able to find it. Clearly, however, people with some idea of how SBL conference websites are set up can find these things without links.
PGM commented: “So, Collins is not contacting bloggers in general, but simply responding to one blogger who contacted him.”
So you can relax! SBL is not diss’ing you and your blog by not asking you to remove program content info.
Sounds like a healthy assessment, Judy.
Hi Edward, I didn’t think they were dissing me and I am pretty well relaxed–as much as a Ph.D. student and a father of a fussy four month old can be. Though, I do appreciate your concern for my mental well being