Last Friday Val and I loaded up to attend one of his industry conferences. This one was Arctic Science Summit Week 2007. Held at Dartmouth in Hanover, NH, the conference attracted scientists and researchers from all over the world who work on the arctic--both North and South poles. Needless to say, very interesting stuff from the snippets I heard over dinner--but they definitely speak their own language. It gave me new insight into what WE must sound like when we all get together at conferences!!
The buzz at the conference was the start of IPY, which stands for International Polar Year, which comes around every 50 years or so. With all the discussion about global warming, it's a timely topic and you probably already have displays set up in your library about it! Flickr brims with cool photos about it.
The main speaker at the Saturday night banquet mentioned the need for worldwide cooperation on data standardization and formats--and the need to communicate wider, in common human language, about the research and findings this group comes up with.
It made me want to stand up in front of everyone and shout out, Have you Thought about Talking to a Librarian?
We (you) excel at this stuff! Worldwide cooperation--I have known no other group who so willingly and diligently works together for the benefit of the whole. And marketing and clear communication is something that more and more librarians are talking about today.
So if you know an arctic scientist--or even if you don't--you might mention your expertise around the faculty club once again.
More Flickr photos of Baker Library. Oh, and I visited the King Arthur Flour Company while the scientists were slaving away. Here I am, on the Flour King's throne! (On St. Patrick's Day, no less...)
6 comments:
Where are you, Alice? I don't see you....
Actual comment related to blog (and not about shoe stretchers or car amplifiers) .... You did email or otherwise contact the speaker to offer the service of librarians throughout the non-polar universe in dealing with their information, didn't you?
---Kurt
Hello! I work for a content aggregation company called Newstex.com. We syndicate blog content to companies like LexisNexis, EBSCO, and a few others. We're interested in adding "It's All Good" to our "Blogs on Demand" service, and this was the only way I could find to contact you. If you're at all interested, could you please send me an email so I can send you more information? I can be reached at LGEROW -at- NEWSTEX -dot- COM. So sorry for hijacking your comments!
WRT "... Have you Thought about Talking to a Librarian?" - ummm, yes, but... this is a really important and complex issue. A lot of important developments in data curation are emerging from within specific disciplines, and in some cases, they should - metadata standards, or parts of them anyway, for example. Librarians CAN bring something to this discussion in general, and should, ASAP, but this train is already rolling. Getting on it will mean bringing some new tools and forging some very new kinds of relationships. If this sounds too vague, I spoke today with a faculty member who had serious doubts about how tending to data could mesh with a library's mission - they are NOT used to thinking of us in that capacity, and in general, we are NOT used to acting in that capacity - but we must (we are where I work). So it's a lot more complicated than just exhorting scientists to talk to us - we need to give them good, specific reasons to.
Totally agree with you, anonymous. And no, Kurt, did not actually e-mail the speaker (yet) but you've given me good reason to consider doing so.
My main idea is that librarians as a whole are very good at standardization of data at an international level. What the whole does with those skills and where they/we apply them is another matter!
Librarians CAN bring something to this discussion in general, and should, ASAP, but this train is already rolling. Getting on it will mean bringing some new tools and forging some very new kinds of relationships.
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