Welcome: Issue #4 of the Registrants Newsletter

The AAUP 2011 Registrants Newsletter provides periodic updates, news, and tips to help you make the most of your attendance at AAUP 2011. You can expect notice of program changes, information about speakers, links to reports and white papers relevant to session topics, and much more. If you have recently registered, you can read past newsletters online.

Special Events & Sponsors of AAUP 2011 

Today, we turn our attention to the numerous special events that, combined with our educational programming, help make the AAUP Annual Meetings both professionally and personally rewarding.

Thanks to Our AAUP 2011 Sponsors 

The generous support of Annual Meeting Sponsors and Friends helps to make our meeting such a success each year, offsetting some costs of the meeting and allowing us to keep registration rates low. We extend our thanks to all of the following. 

Thomson-Shore, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the New York Review of Books are sponsoring the receptions that are such an important part of building AAUP's collegial network. David Simon's appearance has been made possible with support from Johns Hopkins University Press.

BookMobile and CrossRef have generously supported two Early Career Grants, awarded to staff members from Alabama and Minnesota. Women in Scholarly Publishing (WiSP) offered grants to a freelancer and a staff member from Indiana, the Eckersley Memorial Grant is underwriting the attendance of a Nebraska designer, the Western Presses fund is providing travel grants to numerous staff from small western presses, and the Whiting Foundation provided eleven grants to annual meeting newcomers and staff from underrepresented communities.

Marquis Book Printing will provide production of the onsite AAUP 2011 Program. Friesens has donated the production of the 2011 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show catalog. Books International and AAUP 2011 Friends Bowker, BW&A Books, and C-M Books provided funds to offset other costs of the meeting. Finally, the Production & Design Managers Meeting is being supported in part by sponsors Asia Pacific Offset, Brady Palmer, Maple-Vail, and Lehigh Phoenix.

AAUP 2011 Exhibitor Prize Drawings 

Featured Speaker: David Simon 

David Simon and Baltimore are almost inseparable in the national cultural imagination, his writing and TV productions portray a many-layered, deeply complex, deeply troubled, and deeply loved city. His same storytelling eye--journalistic, novelistic, ethnographic--is now turned to New Orleans, through the critically acclaimed series Treme. Simon and his partners reveal the roots and branches of an urban disaster as rooted in man's own political twists and moral compromises as the destruction of inner-city Baltimore documented so famously in The Wire.

Simon comes to AAUP as a writer who can be seen to share a similar mission to that of university presses: serving the social good through communicating knowledge and greater understanding of the lives that surround us. Past opening banquet speakers have included other chroniclers of cities, from the 2005 wit of Buzz Bissinger who introduced us to the Philadelphia of his memories, and--perhaps the most indelible such talk that we have been privileged to hear--Jim Amoss's 2006 reflections on editing the New Orleans Times-Picayune through Katrina and its terrible aftermath. We are grateful to the Johns Hopkins University Press for the support that makes this possible.

Recommended Reading: Digital Book Publishing 2011 Survey Report 

Download the 2011 Report

Breakfast Interest Tables 

On Friday and Saturday mornings, meeting attendees can choose to join interest groups at reserved tables during breakfast. The following breakfast roundtables are being organized:

Friday, June 3

            Managing Editors Roundtable

            Sales Managers Roundtable

            Open Access Textbooks

            Building inter-press connections in book acquisitions

            2011-2012 Committee Chairs (special meeting)

            Managing Book Exhibits 

Saturday, June 4

            Small Press Directors

            Digital Advertising Strategies

            TEI Scholarly Publishing SIG

            Publicists Roundtable

Unwind!   

The social events organized at the AAUP Annual Meeting are an opportunity to unwind, to further the conversations started in panels and sessions, and to meet colleagues new and old.

Newcomers' Reception

We are always pleased to welcome first-timers to the AAUP Annual Meeting. Meet AAUP staff, board, and members of the wider community at 5:00 PM, Thursday, June 2, at the Newcomers' Reception in Grand Ballroom Salons 9-10.

Opening Reception

At 6:00 PM on Thursday, June 2, the full program of AAUP 2011 kicks off with a Thomson-Shore sponsored reception in the Grand Ballroom Foyer.

U.S.S. Constellation

The Chronicle of Higher Education traditionally hosts a Thursday night dessert reception at a local landmark. This year, they bring us to the decks of the USS Constellation, a sloop-of-war launched in 1854 and one of the few remaining Civil-War era warships. Join the Chronicle staff and AAUP colleagues there from 9:45-11:30 PM.

American Visionary Art Museum

On Friday night at 6:30 PM, join the New York Review of Books at America's premier museum for self-taught art. Opened in 1995, AVAM is "one of the city's coolest" sites according to JHUP staff. Before exploring the city for dinner on your own, toast to the spirit of creativity and wonder, and check out exhibits like "What Makes Us Smile."

New York Review will be arranging boats to shuttle people across the Harbor to the reception. Details will posted when available. Guests are responsible for getting their own transportation back to the hotel. The American Visionary Art museum is about a 20 minute walk around the Harbor from the Marriott.

AAUP Special Events  

The 2011 AAUP Constituency Award will be presented at the Opening Banquet on Thursday, June 2. The Constituency Award is an opportunity for the association to honor staff at member presses who have demonstrated active leadership and service to both the association and the university press community.

The 2011 AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show premieres at the meeting in the Dover Room. If most of the meeting is about talking and listening, the design show is a chance to look and feel--to browse some of the best work from AAUP member design and production departments.

And the baton is passed between AAUP outgoing president Richard Brown (Georgetown) and incoming president MaryKatherine Callaway (LSU) at luncheon addresses on Friday June 3 and Saturday June 4.

Sabre Ad Auction 

AAUP continues to organize a Silent Ad Auction during the Annual Meeting to benefit the Sabre Foundation. The following publications have generously donated ad space: 

The Chronicle Review

Harper's Magazine

The Nation

The New Republic

The New York Review of Books

Find more details on ad specs and bidding instructions here.

The Sabre Foundation, which provides "humanitarian aid for the mind" has been supporting the educational needs of countries in conflict, in transition, and on the road to development since 1969. Sabre's Book Donation Program "makes millions of dollars' worth of donated books available to needy individuals in developing and transitional societies worldwide through non-governmental partner organizations, libraries, universities, schools, research organizations and other similar institutions."

Travel & Weather   

For getting around town, the AAUP 2011 website has a few helpful resources. Check out this Google map of conference locations (including the off-site receptions), and refer to the handy guide to local transit in the travel guide prepared by Johns Hopkins University Press staff. 

Check the weather before you pack. But don't forget-whatever the conditions outdoors, meeting rooms can sometimes be chilly. A light sweater or jacket has never gone amiss!