PLC 23 Day 1

Greetings from Bremerhaven and PLC 23!  Our conference is being held in the Klimahaus, Bremerhaven's newest tourist attraction.  But more about that tomorrow – when we get a guided tour of the facility.  Today, we were welcomed to Bremerhaven from Dr. Karin Lochte, the director of the AWI, as well as the Mayor of Bremerhaven (can someone help me out with his name?).  We got a nice overview of the research conducted by the AWI as well as the interesting details about the history of the city of Bremerhaven.  After a brief introduction and welcome from PLC chair Heather Lane, we were treated to two key note speakers.  The first was a very interesting talk from Bernhard Diekmann, of AWI, Potsdam.  He gave a very informative presentation about permafrost and climate change, including the definition of permafrost and the impacts of the warming in the Arctic on permafrost.  Our next keynote speaker was Daniel Steinhage, also of the AWI.  Daniel's talk was called, "Airborne research in cool regions," and focused on the research aircraft of the AWI.  He went over the details of the various aircraft used by the AWI over time and the purpose and importance of the aircraft in polar research.

 

After a very generous luncheon, Session I began with a talk by David Walton called, "Antarctic Bibliographies: listing the literature of a continent."  David summarized a number of the various bibliographies of Antarctica, with commentary about the good ones, bad ones and those in between.  David rightly points out that many young scientists (and other researchers) won't use any materials that they cannot pull up on their computer screens.  As librarians, we know that lots of good material exists that is not accessible online!  The second talk of Session I was a fascinating overview of the "Breitfuss Polar Archives at SPRI: its acquisition and integration into the SPRI collection," by Isabella Warren.  She gave us a good biographical sketch of the life of Breitfuss, as well as the interesting path taken to finally get the collection of materials to SPRI.  Consisting of books, pamphlets and maps, Isabella is pulling together a comprehensive list of the collection, as well as working to make decisions about the best way to preserve the materials and make them accessible.  Finally, Session I ended with a talk from Fred Presteng and the experience he had in digitizing the publications of the Norwegian Polar Institute.  Fred explained that this is a work in progress, with 84 of 400 issues scanned so far.  He also described the perils and pitfalls of digital projects.  Though the scanning was outsourced to big companies, there have been a number of quality issues.  In addition, Fred pointed out the need for the same technical platform to be used by both the vendor and the library.  He also gave some very good suggestions and tips to librarians contemplating digital projects, including suggested file sizes for best quality, yet still keeping file sizes manageable, and advising librarians to do a little research about scanning before embarking on an outsourced scanning project, as this will make communications with vendors much easier.   Day one's session ended with the announcement of the William Mills Book Prize.  Gloria Hicks briefly explained the process by which the book was selected, and then announced the winner: Furs and Frontiers of the Far North: the contest among native and foreign nations for the Bering Strait fur trade, by John Bockstoce.  Graciously accepting the award on the author's behalf was David Walton. 

 

-Laura Kissel, Byrd Polar Research Center Archival Program, OSU