At its 2013 fall meeting, the AASV Board of Directors voted to discontinue printing the annual meeting proceedings booklets starting in 2015. Therefore, in keeping with the theme of the Magic Kingdom and the high tech world of Harry Potter, we’re going electronic in Orlando. There will be no printed proceedings at the 2015 meeting – no big book, no seminar booklets. This change was not made lightly. The inefficiencies and costs associated with printing and distributing these publications, however, helped rationalize the final decision.
All of the proceedings (including seminar papers) will be available for members to download from the AASV website prior to (and during) the conference. They will be available in several formats:
- Single pdf of the proceedings of the regular meeting sessions with linked table of contents; separate pdfs for seminar booklets.
- Mobile-optimized offline web app to provide access to papers (similar to what we’ve had previously on the CD ROM).
- Individual files as part of the Swine Information Library, as in the past. There will be also an option on the meeting registration form to purchase a USB drive containing all of the proceedings (including seminars) for a small additional fee.
If members wish to have printed proceedings, they should plan to download the files and print them out before they come to the conference.
We will also have a mobile app for our meeting this year, in addition to print copies of the program booklet. The mobile app will contain, among other things, the complete meeting schedule with links to the location, papers and speaker information for each presentation, exhibitor listing, maps of the meeting and exhibitor areas, the opportunity to create a personalized schedule of presentations to attend and a “to do” list. The app will be available in iOS, Android, and HTML5 formats, and meeting attendees may download it from the app stores prior to the conference (we’ll send out an email with details when it’s available).