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Food Protection Trends COMMENTARY from the executive director “Please take time today to review the Awards’ listing and prepare
a nomination” February is a busy month for IAFP! Although it is six months prior to our Annual Meeting, much of the base work for the meeting is carried out now. The Program Committee met in late January to set the program in place for IAFP 2005 in Baltimore. Program topics are included in this issue (see page 152) and additional detail will be available on the IAFP Web site between now and August, so check the Web site often for updated program information. In addition to the program coming together, meeting registration and hotel reservations are now open (we encourage making your hotel reservation early this year to assure your room at the host hotel). Also during February, our Exhibit Hall begins to fill up and sponsorship opportunities become more limited. If you are interested in either providing sponsorship for IAFP 2005 or exhibiting at IAFP 2005, contact the IAFP office as soon as possible to ensure your inclusion. Very soon, all IAFP Members will receive the ballot to vote for the next IAFP Secretary (to begin service after IAFP 2005). Be sure to review the biographical information for Stan Bailey and LeeAnne Jackson and return your ballot to the IAFP office by March 18. Your vote is important! The last item we want to encourage you to tend to is to review the list of IAFP Awards on page 120 and nominate a deserving colleague. IAFP has a full complement of Awards that are presented annually at the Annual Meeting. Sometimes over the past few years we have not received a nomination for a certain Award. This is truly a missed opportunity! We have a great number of very active, worthy Members who should be nominated to receive these Awards! Please take time today to review the Awards’ listing and prepare a nomination so that we present all available Awards at IAFP 2005. In our President’s column this month, Kathy Glass announced a new, student travel scholarship program and provided details. If you are a student, you must review this information and consider submitting an application for this new scholar-ship! Professors are also encouraged to review the program and suggest to their students that they submit an application. Now, as you can see, we are very busy with multiple projects and programs underway at any one time. I am sure that is not unlike what we all experience each and every day. Even when we are so busy and under pressure to complete projects according to preset timelines, we must always be extra careful to slow down and pay attention to the details. I am sorry to report that we missed a very important detail in the “2005 Member Guide” that you received last month with your January issue of Food Protection Trends. On the facing page to this column, you see the IAFP Executive Board. If you compare it to what appeared in the “2005 Member Guide,” you will see that our Affiliate Council Chairperson, Stephanie Olmsted’s picture was omitted. Certainly, this was our error as staff and it should not have been printed the way it was. We have numerous proofing and review stages and we even look at the printed pages before binding our publications. With the holiday breaks that took place during production of the Member Guide, this critical step was overlooked. Our goal is to be extra careful during our review processes and to pro-duce the highest quality publications possible. As you can see, we missed a very important step in our processes! We must always follow our checklists. Sometimes that means we need to slow down just a little to be extra careful so that we avoid mistakes such as this one! I can say that in general over the last few years, we have had very few errors and for that we can all be proud. We continue to monitor our processes and make revisions for improvements and we are confident that we can continue to make publications that the Association can be proud of. For the error of omitting Stephanie’s picture from the “2005 Member Guide”, we sincerely apologize. |