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@getty.edu> Date: Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 1:45 PM Subject: Re: AAUP Conference Insights? To: Alex Halavais <alex@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@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@getty.edu www.gettypublications.org -- // // This email is // [ ] assumed public and may be blogged / forwarded. // [x] assumed to be private, please ask before redistributing. // // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur // http://alex.halavais.net //