Document:California HPC Report 18 May 2019

Libertarian Party of California
Historical Preservation Committee

Report for Executive Committee meeting of 18 May 2019

by Joe Dehn

COMMITTEE MEMBERSHIP

The current members of this committee are Joe Dehn, Bill Hajdu, Gail Lightfoot, and Jon Prosser. Since the committee is supposed to have five members, there is one vacancy.

COMMITTEE MEETINGS

We held two meetings since our last report, on 23 February and 23 March. We continue to do most of our work by e-mail and via LPedia.

PROGRESS ON PROJECTS

Our plan of work and the status of various projects is documented on our LPedia page at:

http://lpedia.org/Libertarian_Party_of_California_Historical_Preservation_Committee

Since our last report, we have made significant progress in scanning and uploading issues of past state newsletters; there is a chart on our page showing details of this. The biggest obstacles to completing this project are (1) locating a complete set of the earliest newsletter ("CaLiber") and (2) scanning the issues of the newsletters which were published in tabloid format for which we only have hardcopy. (Tabloid-format newsletters are more difficult to scan both because of the size of the pages and the type of paper.) We would be happy to hear from anybody who might be able to help us with either of these things.

We assembled a display for the state convention which both highlighted what we are trying to do and provided many samples of historical items for attendees to see. This included a display board with lists of conventions, state chairs, candidates for governor and US Senate, graphs of registered Libertarians and central committee members, a list of past state newsletters along with how many issues are online so far, and the "first two years" article from 1974. Also on the table were a notebook containing outreach material, some historical buttons and bumper stickers, and extra copies of The Libertarian Alternative. The backdrop consisted of two LPC banners used at past events. Also posted on the wall was an outreach poster produced by the LPSF.

In preparing for that display we were able to create an essentially complete graph of Libertarian voter registration from the time of the original registration drive to the present. The record of dues-paying state membership (central committee membership and/or all donors), however, is very spotty for significant periods -- although we did produce and display a graph of what we had, I don't expect we will be able to make much more progress on this until we have had a chance to process detailed minutes and officer/committee reports from those periods.

We have had considerable discussion, but not made as much progress as I hoped, on identifying people who can help us with gathering and organizing material relating to local groups. We are looking both for people who would be willing to volunteer to work on this for their own county/region, and people who may have material that would be useful and that they would be willing to share with us even if they don't want to spend time working on it. There is a chart on our page showing who we have identified so far, but it's still pretty sparse.