Chapter 7

Hull Geological Society publications

The Hull Geological Society has a long history of publishing. Thomas Sheppard edited our Transactions from 1893 to 1935. The Society was a joint-publisher of East Yorkshire Field Studies from 1968 to 1973. A new journal was started in 1975 called Humberside Geologist, this was edited by the Secretary Kenneth Fenton and produced using a duplicator at a local school.

The print quality of Humberside Geologist number 4 was improved in 1984 by using a typewriter with a carbon ribbon and a photocopier, this also allowed for the reproduction of clearer line drawings. Over the years the HGS was able to improve their capabilities as technologies became cheaper. From number 5 onwards the Society made use of the Print Room (later renamed the Central Print Unit) at the University who would print for the Society at quiet times of the academic year at little more than cost price. This allowed us to introduce half-tone photographs as printed pages within the photocopied journal. Later we were able to include colour photographs when fast full colour photocopying became available for our relatively short print runs of 150 copies. Automatic collating and stapling meant that we no longer had to collate and bind the journal ourselves.

The printed Humberside Geologist was free for members to collect from meetings or they could pay the cost of postage. It was also available for sale to non-members and still is, although sales have never been very many and the number of members collecting their free copies has declined. The stock of Number 14 was lost in the Hull floods of 2007, but we were able to replace them with a reprint using a grant we received from the Humber and Wolds Rural Community Council in 2008.

With the advent of the World Wide Web the Society was able to publish to a wider audience. We decided to make our journal available free of charge on-line, unlike many other Societies in the UK, because we were not reliant on sales for funding the Society. We may have gained some out of town members who appreciated our altruism. Nigel Whittington with the help of the Computer Centre at the University of Hull scanned some past numbers in 1999 using an early Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program. Later Mike Horne scanned previous journals using OCR and after proof reading he has published some of them on our website.

The Society adopted Nigel Whittington’s website as its own official website in 1999. Nigel Whittington was elected as the first editor of the HGS website from 2000 until 2007. He wrote web pages about local geology as well as uploading Humberside Geologist. The Secretary kept the list of forthcoming meetings up to date. Eventually the advertising on the site from the free hosting became too intrusive and annoying so the Society agreed to pay for a new site. David Baker from Withernsea became the second Website Editor until 2014. He added a Fossil Identification Page that he had written as an assessed piece of work for his University Foundation Award at the Centre of Lifelong Learning at the University of Hull. In 2014 the Committee noticed that the website was not being updated, possibly giving the impression to the viewer that the Society was no longer active. The Society started a new website and Mike Horne became the third Website Editor. The Society was able to purchase the original domain name when it became available a year later. Mike previously had his own website where he published original notes from his geology Adult Education classes, with the consent of the Committee he transferred these to the HGS website and in 2022 added several pieces of unfinished research when he had major health issues.

Advancing technologies have made publishing more affordable and the Society is able to reach a wider audience. At one time the Society offered the opportunity for authors to submit different versions of the same article: a concise one with line drawings and high contrast half tone photographs for the print version, a longer one with colour photographs and additional data in appendices for a CD-ROM version and a long version with low quality digital images for the website, when the internet was slower and less hosting space was available.

Two special editions of Humberside Geologist were produced on CD-ROM that included sound recordings of talks. Anne Emery had recorded the lectures at the Centenary Meeting in 1988 onto cassette tape, these were transferred to CD for Special Publication Number 2. Special Publication Number 1 was a record of the “Footsteps of Lamplugh” meeting held in 2005. The interactive catalogue of the HGS Library compiled by Paul Richards was published on CD-ROM in 2003.

Before we used internet abstracts of meetings, obituaries and “notes and Comments” would have appeared in the printed version of the journal. From 2005 onwards these have been published on the “news” pages of the website and then in the archives section of the website. In effect the Humberside Geologist section of the website is only used for peer reviewed ‘scientific papers’ now. Articles for number 15 were published on line up to 2015 though we do not have the actual date for the first uploading of each article.

Society news was sent to members with the Programmes and AGM Agenda. Later a “notes and comments” section was added to our journal. In 1999 the Secretary started to send a newsletter to members by e-mail. A news page was added to the website to include more information about the meetings such as abstracts of lectures and public announcements. This news was then was transferred to archive pages as a permanent record of past meetings.

The Society also embraced the use of social media. The Facebook public page was started in 2011 now has over 400 followers. There were over 1400 views in August 2025 by people over the age or 25, with 60% living in Hull, about 17% in the rest of the East Riding and 92% living in the UK [Statistics from the Facebook site management page 24^th August 2025]. A Facebook members’ only Club Page was started in March 2020 as a way of allowing members to communicate when we were not allowed to meet because of the Covid Pandemic. Membership is for current members of the HGS, those in arrears are warned that they will be removed from the private group. Any member can post images, suggestions and comments and 28 HGS members use it at present.

The Society never really raised much funds from the sale of its publications so the early decision to publish on-line was common sense and reinforced our commitment to our charitable aims. However there have been examples of breach of copyright. We are really happy for non-members to read and use our publications free of charge, but some have gone too far. The first instance we noticed was in 2006 when a fossil dealer plagiarised an article from Humberside Geologist, but he apologised when we contacted him and he made a donation to the Society. We noticed subsequent examples such as an individual in the USA copied David Baker’s fossil identification pages from our website and was selling it and another person copied a substantial amount of text from an article by Paul Hildreth and included it in an advert for a book he was selling. Images from our website appeared in online teaching materials of several UK schools without attribution. A formal copyright statement was introduced in 2006 to clarify our commitment to free distribution but stating that we objected to the unauthorised commercial use of our intellectual property. Later in 2006 a copyright fee was introduced and the Committee agreed to “name and shame” on the website anyone who infringed the copyright and refused to pay the fee. A statement was added in 2020 to include the redistribution of our material from our Social Media and online lecture meetings. However, there seems little we can do to prevent the recent advent of Artificial Intelligence which is plagiarising our website and journal.

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