Day 2 - PLC 24

Day 2 of the Colloquy featured a panel discussion, a poster session, and a tour rather than regular sessions.

AAR panel: Moving forward

The day began with a panel discussion about the Arctic and Antarctic Regions database. Sharon Tahirkheli (AGI) chaired the discussion with panelists Martha Andrews (INSTAAR retired), Ross Goodwin (AINA), and Craig Brandt (EBSCO Senior Director, Product Management). The discussion focused on how we can get past the stalled process that means new records from contributors like SPRI and ASTIS have not been added to AAR.

Sharon gave an account of funding cuts, personnel changes, and what has happened between EBSCO and AAR participants over the last few years. Martha reviewed the history of AAR: why it was begun within PLC, who was involved, and how the records were handled and became a CD-ROM subscription product from NISC. In 2009 EBSCO bought AAR and converted it to an online database as part of its suite of products.

Craig Brandt expressed a desire for better communication with the PLC user group and came as a product developer (rather than sending a sales representative) to aid direct, useful conversations. He presented some information on how EBSCO's processes work and listed their concerns. The NISC version of AAR was designed to ingest records from 9 different organizations, each with different controlled vocabularies and formats. EBSCO can really only build one ingest tool for each database. They were stymied by how to de-dup records and standardize the controlled vocabularies used by various contributors. They identified a number of journals with polar content, and added cover-to-cover records from those journals. In retrospect that added a large number of records that had nothing to do with polar subjects to the database, diluting the quality of search results.

Discussion revolved around how we can move forward from here, building a smooth pipeline for contributors' records into AAR and increasing the quality of the database. EBSCO was already aware of the problem of irrelevant content and Craig relayed that many of the records about tropical and temperate environments will be removed. Only 3-4 of the organizations that originally contributed records to AAR are still adding to their bibliographies, which reduces the number of players to worry about. PLC members agreed that duplicate records were not a major problem for us or our users, which removes one of EBSCO's concerns. EBSCO will convert records to their own, less specific controlled vocabulary, but can maintain contributors' vocabularies in a different field as well so that they can still be used in search. Overall, we came out with a workable approach to renewing the database. I for one am looking forward to renewing my library's AAR subscription that I let lapse a couple of years ago.  

Poster session

After a break, a poster session gave us glimpses into many interesting projects. Sandy Campbell (coauthors Kim Frail, Debbie Feisst, and Robert Desmarais) showed us the Deakin Review of Children's Literature, a quarterly review of quality children's books that The University of Alberta Libraries just took over last year. Kathy Murray's "Health Aspects of Arctic Exploration" portrayed the research materials of Robert Fortuine, donated to the University of Anchorage libraries in 2006. Nancy Gonzales of DRPA Canada talked about her poster "Northwest Territories Geoscience Office Online Business Applications." Hilary Shibata of SPRI presented "The Scott Centenary Bibliography Project: Adapting Old Records to New Standards of Accessibility," that she coauthored with the absent Heather Lane. Ross Goodwin of AINA displayed the various flavors of ASTIS on "The Arctic Science and Technology Information System (ASTIS): Canada's National Northern Database." And Heidi McCann (coauthors Chris McNeave, Mark Parsons, Shari Gearheard, Henry Huntington, and Peter Pulsifer, all of National Snow and Ice Data Center) displayed a poster on the project she spoke on during Day 1, "Archiving Local and Traditional Knowledge of the Arctic."

NICL tour

After lunch we piled into a bus and headed down Highway 93 to the National Ice Core Lab, part of the U.S. Geological Survey facility in Denver's Federal Center. Geoff Hargreaves, NICL Curator, showed us a drill and told us how ice is cored and what the cores tell us about the climate and environment of past eras. We peppered him with questions. By the end of the tour we had learned how the cores are transported to the lab, how they are processed in the lab, where the cores come from, where other core facilities are located around the world (lots of help from the crowd on that one), the characteristics of ice from various depths, dealing with pressure and temperature changes, what analyses are run on the cores, where the data goes, what metadata is kept about each core, and many other topics. Geoff used FileMaker 1 to store information about the cores when they first set up the lab, and they are still using it (now in version 11). Thank you Geoff for your gracious indefatigability!

 We filed past the windows of the lab, watching an energetic group of scientists and grad students process sections of core in a kind of assembly line (disassembly line?). The work room is kept colder than negative 30 degrees C, so that ice dust created by sawing the cores into pieces doesn't melt into water droplets. People working in the lab wear insulated suits, with latex gloves over their insulated gloves to reduce contamination of the ice. Geoff changes the blades on the saws every day during work sessions.

Then we assembled for the highlight of the tour: Geoff slid back a big insulated door and let us into the storage area of the lab, kept at a cozy negative 40 degrees. We filed into the aisles, where the silver cylinders holding core pieces are stacked on shelves reaching high overhead. We saw cores from sites in Greenland and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, among others. Berit thought the lab felt fairly comfortable, but the rest of us were shivering and exclaiming at the cold.

Back on the bus and to Boulder!