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