FEPA News

FEPA NEWS 45 31 FEPA Exhibiting Every year, national delegates to the individual exhibition commissions are invited send reports to the FIP on activities in their countries during the previous year. They are asked about the number and types of exhibitors in their respective countries, whether activities such as exhibitions and seminars are taking place, and much more. For us at the FIP Commission Bureau for Postal History, it was interesting this year to learn beyond these numbers how the new guidelines for exhibiting and judging postal history exhibits were received. Are they widely known, and are they helpful for both exhibitors and jurors? In recent years, we have also seen recurring difficulties in evaluating Class 2C (“Social Philately”) exhibits. Additionally, exhibitors have registered their exhibits under 2C but they did not meet the criteria. Therefore, we wanted to know from our delegates how this class is perceived in their countries. Are there experiences in evaluation, and are there any exhibits in this group at all? I can report with great gratitude that 18 delegates from FEPA Members have returned their questionnaires. This represents a sample of more than 40 percent of all member countries. A trend has emerged across all reports: unfortunately, the pandemic still has a noticeable impact on European philately. Compared to previous reports, the number of events and exhibitions has significantly decreased. In many countries, there are no longer any national exhibitions, or at most, only one. However, a new trend has emerged in some countries: from analogue to digital. The number of digital exhibitions is steadily increasing. It is also encouraging that some countries are focusing heavily on seminars. As two examples, I would like to mention Italy and Germany, where seminars are regularly held either analogously as part of exhibitions or digitally. The participation rate in digital seminars is pleasingly high. Almost half of all countries that responded suffer from a significant decline in jurors. It is becoming more and more difficult to inspire young (or even middle-aged) collectors to become jurors. For this reason, it is feared that this trend will continue and there is no end in sight. This is also evident in the number of FIP jurors from Europe. It is urgently necessary for more European jurors to qualify at the FIP level. We divided our survey regarding the guidelines into two levels. First, we wanted to know how helpful the guidelines are for building a good postal history exhibit or for jury work. For this, we opted for a point system: 1 point means not very helpful, while 10 points mean extremely helpful. It turned out that most countries are working with the guidelines. The grading was very good: On average, the revised guidelines received a rating of 8 points. The minimum was one of 5 points, the maximum one of 10 points. The familiarity with the guidelines also seems to be very high. They have already been translated into most FEPA languages, are available online for jurors and exhibitors, and seminars have been held on them in many countries. The guidelines have also been published in numerous magazines of federations. As a secondpoint,weaskedabout experienceswith theguidelines inpractical juryworkand resulting recommendations. The online offerings of the FIP that are already available were often emphasised positively. Valuable hints could be obtained for the individual evaluation criteria. However, because of a lack of exhibitions most federations had not yet had sufficient experience with evaluating according to the new guidelines. Therefore, it was often noted that it was too early to give a definitive answer to our question. But I was also asked why new guidelines are needed at all and what the essential differences to the old guidelines are. On the positive side it was noted that the guidelines have been clarified and serve to standardise judging of PH exhibits. Exhibitors also note positively the improved clarity of the revised guidelines, particularly in the presentation Postal History Exhibiting in Europe Gerald Heschl is a well-known postal historian who has specialised in Austrian pre-philatelic letters and transit-mail. He recently joined the Bureau of the FIP Postal History Commission as a FEPA representative and has carried out a survey of postal history exhibiting around Europe. He kindly accepted our invitati- on to let us know the results of this survey. He writes: