22nd Polar Libraries Colloquy - Tuesday, June 3, 2008

The second day of the PLC in Edmonton started with a wonderful performance by an aboriginal trio by the name of Asani. Their beautiful songs were a great start of a day with a very full program.

The keynote speech this day was by the Cree author Larry Loyie and his partner Constance Brissenden. Larry is a writer of children's fiction books, and told us about the challenges of being an aboriginal writer and getting your writings published.

The first session started with Lia Ruttan's talk on Locating literature. When working in the area of northern history, there is a great difference in the way Western literature documents the events in the North, and the way the local people experience their own history. The writings of explorers and adventurers are often based on very short stays. The indigenous people's history on the other hand is passed on in an oral tradition. The challenge is to get the oral history recorded in a way, where it is a partnership created to re-story the past in an ethical way.

Next Rae-Lynne Aramburo told us about book publishing in Nunavut. There are but four publishers in Nunavut, of which one has now been dissolved. Most publishing is concerned with teaching materials in Inuktitut, mostly as bilingual English/Inuktitut publications. As the publishers are non-commercial and funding is a problem, the challenge is the distribution of these materials.

After lunch session two started with Sharon Tahirkheli and her talk on: Do we really need the Cold Regions Bibliography Project when we have web-based search engines? A vey relevant question as many students and researchers are prone to think the they get all the necessary information through Google Scholar. Sharon had compared different searches in CRBP and Google, and although Google came out with quite good results in some of these searches, the CRBP proves to be more focused. This is based on a well defined coverage and a controlled vocabulary.

Arto Vitikka then told us about information and database management in the Barents region. The Arctic Center in Rovaniemi maintains the portal http://www.barentsinfo.org/. New web technologies are being introduced and Arto told us about semantic web technology, which makes contents of the information understandable and processable by machines.

Session three started with Lynn Lay's talk about the Byrd Polar Research Centre's project of collecting images and documentation from researchers at the center. It proved not to be that easy to get researchers to take the time to collect and hand over their archival material. The idea is to create a database which will document the history of the Byrd Center, and make available the scientific outcomes.

The session concluded with Heather Lane's talk on: Beyond text - using library and archival collections at the SPRI to contextualise the visual image. SPRI has launched a project of preserving historic polar images called the Freeze frame project. 20.000 images from SPRI's historical collection together with manuscript materials and photographs from the museum collection are added to a database. The aim is to promote the understanding of polar history. Another aim is to preserve the very rare and fragile materials.

This was a short summary of the day's session. In half an hour we shall be joining the University of the Arctic attendants for an Icebreaker at the Timms Center.

Vibeke Sloth Jakobsen, Danish Polar Center