The marketing committee was brainstorming before Christmas about ways to promote AIS. One way that has never been utilized in recent years is to get people interested in a subject and shown them an example of information about that subject that is available if you are a member. Actually most of you are too young to remember that AIS used to put out a limited number of reprints. For those who know the modern world a reprints were common for many journals way back in the 50’s and 60’s where an article of interest was published as a separate unit and distributed to interested parties on request. It was felt then that it promoted the journal. Today all of this is done by e-mail. If one was interested in promoting ones journal often reprints would be advertised as available on request. This was very common in the scientific community of which I was a part.
It was suggested that there could be a variety of ways in which we could use this marketing technique to promote the AIS bulletin by making available an article from the past or even perhaps occasionally present Bulletins. On further thought it was noted that presently every use of a bulletin article requires a motion by someone to the board and then board approval. For example I remember the New Zealand Iris Society requesting the use of an article to be reprinted in their project a few years ago. Although it only took 15 minutes at a board meeting to approve it who knows how long their request was submitted before we had the meeting. I cannot remember the board ever denying such approval. If we had five requests a year, that would mean five e-mail discussions for two weeks each. We would have to repeat the discussions that have already occurred within committee again for the board. Al this work just to get started on a promotion tends to kill any effort. I would like to make the motion that the AIS president has the authority to approve uses of Bulletin articles being reprinted.