Tag Archives: annual meeting

AAUP12 Twitter feed (partial) archive

Annual Meetings, , , ,

By Dennis Lloyd

One of the great things about the AAUP meeting in the last few years has been the simultaneous conversations that have taken place on Twitter before, during, and after the meeting. The use of the #aaup12 hashtag made it easy to keep up with discussions, and even follow presentations that were taking place simultaneously to the one you were attending. (Or, in the case of AAUP staff members who weren’t able to attend, even if you weren’t in Chicago at all.)

However, what if you want to revisit that information later? It’s incredibly difficult to do so. (Don’t believe me? Go to your twitter account and try to search for the #aaup11 hashtag.) There are ways to archive, but also difficult to do after the fact. At least as far as I can determine.

I don’t know Martin Hawksey, but I was able to follow the instructions on of his blog posts to create a partial archive of the #aaup12 tweets. I say partial, because the 1500-tweet limit only allowed me to back up to some point during the first round of sessions on Tuesday morning. Although someone with better blogging skills than I might be able to actually fold them into this post, instead, I’ll just offer a link to the spreadsheet of those posts I created on google docs.

Hope some of you find this helpful! And if anyone has a complete archive of tweets, or knows of a better way to save them, step up!

AAUP announces results of most recent digital publishing survey

Business, Digital Formats, Open Access, , , , , , , ,

One the eve of its annual conference, the Association of American University Presses has launched a redesigned website and released the results of its second digital book publishing survey in as many years. The press release announcing the report can be read here, and the report itself is available for download.

In addition to providing interesting statistical breakdown as to the number of presses participating in a wide variety of digital publication efforts, it also reveals the widespread (unavoidable?) use of digital technology in traditional print publishing, particularly print-on-demand.

For most presses  (53 of 71 who participated in the survey) revenue from sales of electronic editions remains below 3%. It will be interesting to see how/if that changes in the coming year, particularly since the percentage of presses now reporting as participating in site licenses to libraries has nearly doubled (from 34% in the 2009-2010 survey to 65% in the Spring 2011 survey).

Overall, finding a working business model and creating systems to best allocate limited resources remain the biggest obstacles faced by university presses when it comes to digital publishing. As the report clearly demonstrates, despite these concerns, AAUP member presses are actively and enthusiastically embracing the possibilities. And if history is any indicator, following this weekend’s annual conference, “The Next Wave: Toward a Culture of Collaboration,” that enthusiasm will be redoubled throughout the summer.