[Air-L] AAUP Conference Insights?

[Alex Halavais]

This is very helpful. Clearly, we need to steal Susan Patton
(kidding!). We've been doing it largely with volunteer labor, and are
on the cusp of bringing in someone salaried to do--among other
things--much of this work. I become president of the Association next
year, and so have all sorts of grand plans. Of course, I'm sure all of
my predescessors did as well...

Thanks again,

Alex


On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 2:04 PM, Alex Halavais <alex at halavais.net> wrote:
> Hi, all,
> I spoke at the American Association of University Presses meeting last week
> in SLC (only one other AoIRer there). It was a pretty good conference, and
> so I followed up with the program chair on how things were organized. It's a
> bit easier on him since they have fewer parallel sessions, and they are
> generally organized by panel organizers. However, it's similar in size to
> IR. See below.
> Best,
> Alex
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Gregory Britton <gbritton at getty.edu>
> Date: Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:45 PM
> Subject: Re: AAUP Conference Insights?
> To: Alex Halavais <alex at halavais.net>
>
>
> Hi Alex:
>
> The AAUP has their conference planning down pretty tight, but that's partly
> because they have an office staff to handle all the logistics. As chair, my
> responsibilities were strictly programmatic--assemble a small committee,
> pick topics, and draft speakers. We (the committee) also took on the
> responsibility of promoting the meeting with the social networking things
> (Facebook and Twitter). This was new for the meeting and proved very
> effective.
>
> The office staff (basically one person focused on this--Susan Patton at the
> AAUP spatton at aaupnet.org) negotiated the hotel arrangements, rooms, field
> trips, meals, assembling the printed program, and multiple receptions. She
> also handled all the exhibitors. Susan is an organizational force and has
> the details down. This is crucial.
>
> As I understand it, the AAUP commits to a multi-year contract with some
> chain hotel to get the best rates, but this limits the cities the board can
> select from. This partly explains Salt Lake. With the Marriott chain, for
> every Washington or Philadelphia you are forced to take an Oklahoma City or
> Salt Lake or some other desperate little town. It's how they spread the
> conference business around their network of hotels. The AAUP is committed to
> some geographic diversity so they try for at least one western meeting ever
> 3-4 years. They also occasionally do a Canadian meeting, but never venture
> much father than that.
>
> Having said the AAUP has their system down, they don't deal with change very
> easily. Asking for free wi-fi in all rooms seemed to flummox them--hotels
> charge extra for this--and the idea of marketing the meeting seemed to
> escape them until we demonstrated how it could be done effectively. Given
> the location and publishing economy, they were praying for 400 attendees.
> They got about 535 including some walk-ins which still amazes me. Lost
> people from the lost tribe?
>
> Anyway, please ask other questions --
>
> My best,
>
> Greg
>
> Gregory M. Britton
> Publisher | Getty Publications
> 1200 Getty Center Drive | Suite 500
> Los Angeles, CA 90049
> (T) 310 440 6066 | gbritton at getty.edu
> www.gettypublications.org
>
> --
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> // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur
> // http://alex.halavais.net
> //
>



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