21st Polar Libraries Colloquy - Thursday, May 11th, 2006

Session 7 began with Shelly Sommer describing the strong and growing relationship between the libraries at the Institute for Arctic and Alpine Research and the National Snow and Ice Data Center at University of Colorado.

Judie Triplehorn told us about some of the history of publication in the Barrow area and David Ongley described the developments in the building of BASC, the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium. Barrow looks like a place we would all like to visit in the future.

Sandy Campbell
Canadian Circumpolar Collection
University of Alberta
Edmonton

21st Polar Libraries Colloquy - Thursday, May 11th (continued)

The final presentation of Session 7 was given by Daria Carle who told us about the building of Consortium Library at University of Alaska Anchorage and also about other groups who collaborate in their network including the Health Sciences Information Service, the Alaska Moving Image Preservation Association and The Alaska Digital Archives.

Sandy Campbell
Canadian Circumpolar Collection
University of Alberta
Edmonton
Canada

21st Polar Libraries Colloquy -Thursday, May 11th, 2006

This morning's sessions began with Michela Cecconi and Andrea Marchitelli of the Consortium for the Italian Antarctic Programme giving a thorough presentation on the NILDE document delivery system, which is used by 508 Italian libraries. This paper engendered some discussion about copyright issues around document delivery in Europe.

Irina Merkina, this year's Wenger award winner, from the Polar Research Institute of Marine Fisheries and Oceanography in Murmansk gave an overview of the history of her organization and described some of the other libraries in Murmansk

Satu Hallikainen rounded out Session 6 with an inspiring paper on the importance of using open-source software and open standards.

Sandy Campbell
Canadian Circumpolar Collection
University of Alberta
Edmonton

21st Polar Libraries Colloquy - Hubert Wenger Auction

The Hubert Wenger Auction tables are full of the most interesting items and bidding is becoming more intense. There are maps, books, videos, maple syrup, t-shirts, posters, mittens and other interesting souvenirs. Among the items reserved for the outcry auction at the banquet are a quilt, polar bear face slippers, a wind-up boat with a penguin paddling and several bottles of "lubricant". We are expecting excellent returns for the Wenger fund.

Sandy Campbell
Canadian Circumpolar Collection
University of Alberta

21st Polar Libraries Colloquy - Tuesday, May 9th, 2006

David Walton was great as Chair of this very informative second session, which opened with a presentation by Nancy Liston of the Cold Regions Engineering Laboratory. The presentation focused on the growing challenges in operations and maintenance of the Cold Regions Laboratory and library, which include major institutional reorganization, major funding shifts in the military (as a result of changing priorities especially over the last 2 years), and staff flow-out with retirement resulting in great losses in human and financial resources to continue the work to the level the laboratory and library have enjoyed in the past. Concerns for bibliographic comprehensiveness, and the ability to respond to information needs enquiries are overshadowed by concerns for the long-term sustainability of the collections and services. The current means of alleviating the concern for identification of materials is through collaboration and networking, and seems to be working. The question remains, however, about the future viability of this and other resource centres, as more positions are lost through retirement and capacity in terms of information specialists will be left wanting.

The second presentation by Sharon Tahirkheli of the American Geological Institute echoed the concern for comprehensiveness in bibliographic services, and outlines several collaborative arrangements that have proven most effective for the Cold Regions Bibliography Project, outlining the benefits to all.

Paolo Lini of the Institute for Atmospheric Pollution, EKOLab provided an overview of the very interesting terminology database on snow and ice project. The presentation focused on the advantages of developing a common terminology in for a specific area in a structured reference multilingual and technical vocabulary for accuracy in research reporting and in the subsequent indexing of that material for bibliography and databases. Although theoretically the database will include indigenous languages in the subset areas, on a practical level this is not currently possible because the structure of the thesaurus (using eastern knowledge systems) does not lend itself to organizing the terms for other knowledge systems.

Session 3, chaired by Berit Jakobsen, featured three presentations (one as a panel discussion) for the collection, indexing, and preservation of data and metadata for International Polar Year (IPY)-related projects. A first presentation by Ross Goodwin of the Arctic Science and Technology Information System (ASTIS), Arctic Institute of North America and Heather Lane of the Scott Polar Research Institute focused on plans for information management for the upcoming IPY. The second presentation by Ruth Duerr of the National Snow and Ice Data Center described a project to recover and catalogue materials from past IPYs. The panel discussion outlined some of the challenges ahead in identifying and recovering the material, and outlined current thinking on how the project might tag and index the expected 20,000+ publications resulting from IPY, and collect these into subsets of existing databases that would be accessible from a single portal.

This afternoon we are headed for a visit to the National Library, and so there will be no further reporting until tomorrow.

Elaine Maloney
Canadian Circumpolar Institute
University of Alberta

21st Polar Libraries Colloquy - Monday, May 8th, 2006

Today was the beginning of the 21st Polar Libraries Colloquy, hosted at the National Research Council in Rome. About 60 people attended and represented a great diversity of nations--Italy, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark, Finland--to name a few.

The Conference began with welcoming remarks that concerned Italian research efforts in Antarctica, which is also celebrating its 21st year of activities.

Because the conference proceedings will be published, I will offer only some highlights.

Deidre Stamm provided an informative and entertaining overview of early efforts at networking information that took the forms of books, newspapers published during the expeditions, and even pre-printed forms to be left in caches to indicate events and destinations.

A second paper by Mary Katherine Jones also addressed early networking but concerned itself with efforts as early as cartography in 1290. Particularly noteworthy was the statement that the custom of the leader of the expedition publishing first was not common until after Martin Frobisher.

Three papers ended the day. Laura Kissel presented a case study of declassification of materials in the papers of Admiral Richard E. Byrd at The Ohio State University. She pointed to the difficulties of finding the right federal office (Information Security Oversight Office) and the challenges of receiving a timely response.

Irene Piippola of Finland presented a colorful presentation concerning early maps of Lapland and used the website "Travellers in Lapland. " Finally, Vibeke Sloth Jakobsen and Kirsten Lkuver of the Danish Polar Center discussed the centennial of the Danish Expedition to Greenland, 1906 to 1908. Although lives were lost on the expedition, it was successful in mapping the unknown coast of Northern Greenland. An exhibit will soon appear on the website of the Danish Polar Center.

The day ended with an open discussion of the University of the Arctic. All in all, this was a very informative day that also allowed people to meet and talk with each other--to network at a polar conference with the theme "Building Polar Networks."

Raimund E. Goerler
Ohio State University

"Building Boom" in Antarctica

An interesting article recently appeared in the New Zealand Herald on April 19, 2006, regarding the building of new research stations in Antarctica.

"A research station set to be built by the Baltic state of Estonia in New Zealand's Ross Dependency is part of a construction boom expected on the frozen continent of Antarctica next summer.

The development rush has been linked to the declaration of next year as international polar year, but there are concerns it will create environmental problems, Melbourne's The Age newspaper reported yesterday."

The full article is available at:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10377992

Julia Finn
Departmental Library
Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Ottawa