Archive for July, 2013

2012 IAMSLIC Conference Proceedings dedicated to retired long-term members

Dear colleagues,

 I have a pleasure of informing you that the 2012 IAMSLIC Conference proceedings which have recently been entered into the WHOAS repository http://darchive.mblwhoilibrary.org/handle/1912/5979 are dedicated with thanks to several long-term IAMSLIC members who have recently retired.

 They are:

 Stephanie Haas

Jan Heckman

Kathy Maxson

Gordon Miller

Natalie Wiest

Diane Walker

 

Best regards,

 Maria Kalentsits

IAMSLIC President 2012-2013

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July 31, 2013 · Filed under President's updates

New IAMSLIC members to the Joint IODE-IAMSLIC GE-MIM

Dear colleagues,

 

The IOC Assembly has approved the Joint IODE-IAMSLIC Group of Experts on Marine Information Management (GE-MIM).

I am pleased to announce members who will represent IAMSLIC in the Joint GE-MIM:

1.       Joan Parker (Moss Landing Marine Laboratories/Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Library, USA) – 4-year member

2.       Michelle Leonard (University of Florida, Marston Science Library, USA)   – 4-year member

3.       Heike Lust (VLIZ, Belgium)  – 4-year member

4.       Gabriela Silvoni (INIDEP, Argentina) -  2-year member; will be replaced by Maria A. Ginori (Acuario Nacional de Cuba, Cuba) in 2015

Congratulations to the new members on their nomination!

We look forward to the continuing productive cooperation between IAMSLIC and IODE.

 

Maria Kalentsits

IAMSLIC President 2012-2013

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July 26, 2013 · Filed under President's updates

Forum on the Future of Scientific Publishing

If I had not had a prior commitment at Hopkins, I would have driven up to Stanford to attend this workshop.  I was bummed I had to miss it.  The good news is they saved all the slide presentations and video taped the event.  You can view the sessions for free.  Below are details on it.

Joe Wible, Hopkins Marine Station

http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/1460549/c02e3e1828/572228231/01298e4a70/

Stanford University Library logo
July 16, 2013
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Data Management Services @ Stanford
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Austrian National Library, Photo by Flickr user joiseyshowaa CC BY-SA 2.0
Microarray, Photo by Flickr user kat m research CC BY-SA 2.0
Future of Scientific Publishing
The Forum on the Future of Scientific Publishing was held on June 27, 2013, at the Li Ka Shing Center on the Stanford University campus. The Forum allowed major stakeholders to present their perspectives on impending federal policy changes regarding open access to scientific research.The event included speakers from scientific society publishers, commercial publishers, university libraries, university researchers, open access advocates, industry, and government agencies.

Slide presentations and video from the event are now available online on our web site.

The Forum was held in response to the recent memo from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy regarding access to federally-funded scientific research. More background information and an article about the event are available on our web site.

This event was sponsored by:
Stanford University Dean of Research Office,
Stanford University Libraries, Stanford University School of Engineering, American Physical Society, Stanford Photonics Research Center
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Amy Hodge
Science Data Librarian
amyhodge@stanford.edu | 650.556.5194

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July 16, 2013 · Filed under Announcements

Z39.50 Distributed Library and Union List migrating to iamslic.org

Since IAMSLIC decided several years ago to move its website to a new hosting service, it has been one of my goals to attempt to also move other IAMSLIC functions from my library’s server to the iamslic.org hosted server. The first major step in that process is now hopefully complete: both the Z39.50 Distributed Library and the Union List of Marine and Aquatic Serials are now running on the iamslic.org server.

Some of you may have noticed problems with the Z39.50 searches recently, especially when one tried to display the next page of search results, and that problem has been resolved in the new configuration. You will also notice some slight differences in the way the Union List of Serials is integrated into the Distributed Library search page.  If you are looking for a journal title, you can click for an alphabetical listing from the Union List of Serials right from the Distributed Library search page. Additionally, the first 25 search results from the Union List of Serials will display at the top of all search results, with the option to click on a link to view all matching results from the Union List. As a secondary benefit, the new configuration has eliminated for me the time-consuming process of exporting and indexing the Union List records to make them searchable via the Z39.50 protocol; the Union List database is now queried directly and the results are integrated into the display along with the Z39.50 results from member library catalogs.

Please update any links or shortcuts to the new addresses:

  • IAMSLIC Z39.50 Distributed Library http://www.iamslic.org/ill/
  • Search the Z39.50 Distributed Library http://www.iamslic.org/ill/search.php
  • Union List of Marine and Aquatic Serials http://www.iamslic.org/unionlist/

Please note that the Latin American and African Union Lists of Serials have not yet been moved, nor has the membership database or interlibrary loan module. You will still be taken to the library.csumb.edu server from your search results to complete borrowing requests, but the process should be transparent. I will be working to migrate those services as well over the coming weeks. In the meantime, please report to me any unexpected errors or problems that you encounter.

–Steve

Steve Watkins
California State University, Monterey Bay, Library
swatkins@csumb.edu

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July 12, 2013 · Filed under Announcements

Visualization of the IAMSLIC membership

Long-time member Pauline Simpson noted recently that visualization is emerging as a primary method to present data, information and knowledge; indeed the 2013 IAMSLIC Conference has included this in its program topics. During 2013, ‘Creating georeferenced bibliographies using Google Earth and Geo-Commons: the Coos Bay Bibliography’ by Jenni Schmitt and Barb Butler. Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, No. 71, 2012. www.istl.org/12-fall/article1.html was published; it reminded Pauline of the potential of geovisualization tools for information products. She suggested earlier this year that the IAMSLIC Membership was a suitable dataset for geovisualization and contacted several colleagues for feeback on the idea. As a result, an informal project team was formed, consisting of Pauline Simpson, Barbara Butler, Steve Watkins, and Kristen LaBonte, IAMSLIC’s current Membership Database Manager.

We extracted address information from the membership database, tested several geocoding services for translating addresses into latitude/longitude coordinates, and used the coordinates to create prototype maps. The prototypes uncovered the need to edit and update some of the membership data, including attempting to locate website addresses for as many member institutions as possible where they were lacking in the database. Steve wrote scripts to build the maps on the fly using live data from the membership database, ensuring that the map displays will be automatically updated to reflect any changes to the address information in the database. The team presented the maps to the Executive Board and received approval to make them an integral part of the IAMSLIC website.

When you visit the IAMSLIC home page, you will now see the more limited public map, whose markers only indicate the name of the library and then offer a link to the library’s or institution’s website; no personal information is exposed via the public map. The second map on the Membership Directory page is only visible after one logs in to the page with the IAMSLIC members’ password, but it gives the name of the member and a link to full contact information for that member, offering another way of looking up member information by location when one does not know the person’s name or institution.

We encourage you to take a look at the maps and to provide us with any feedback for improvements. Please note that member locations are only geocoded to the level of city. Since multiple members are located in some cities, to see all individual markers one needs to zoom in to the location on the map until the separate markers appear. We recommend that you also continue to consult the alphabetical listings or search the membership directory for a particular person or location.

–Pauline Simpson, Barb Butler, Steve Watkins and Kristen LaBonte

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July 8, 2013 · Filed under Announcements, Interesting sites

Taking “Embedded Librarianship” to the Extreme

About a month ago, one of the Hopkins faculty members offered me the opportunity to help with research projects on Palmyra Atoll in the south Pacific. This is a small U.S. territory (less than 5 square miles of land) located about 1,000 miles south of Hawaii. I will be working with a former Hopkins Marine Station graduate student, helping him install 180 coral settlement plates on the outer reef. I will also be helping a HMS postdoc place acoustic tags on grey reef sharks.

Palmyra Atoll USFWS

I leave on July 21 and will be away for a month. Don Kohrs and Vicki Pearse will keep the Miller Library running while I am gone. Despite being in one of the most remote places on earth, there is WiFi. I hope to be able to check my email once a day in the evening. Note that the Miller Library will suspend its participation in the Z39.50 until I return.

This is an amazing opportunity to SCUBA dive on one of the few remaining pristine coral reefs in the world and interact with other teams of scientists from UC Santa Barbara and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

If you are interested in knowing more about the trip, check out the blog I started to document my trip:

Librarian on Palmyra Atoll

There won’t be a lot of photos until I actually get there, but right now I am writing up the process of preparing for the trip.

Joe Wible, Hopkins Marine Station

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July 3, 2013 · Filed under Announcements

2012-13 Summary of Resource Sharing Statistics

In July of each year, I collate and summarize the resource sharing statistics from the IAMSLIC Distributed Library project. 2012/13 represents the eleventh complete year of the resource sharing program. A total of 4322 requests were submitted during 2012/13, an overall decrease of 17% from the previous year. A total of 43,023 requests have been submitted via the system since its inception in 2002.

The resource sharing program continues to be broadly international in scope, with 75 different IAMSLIC lending libraries in 26 countries receiving borrowing requests from 124 IAMSLIC libraries in 45 countries, similar to previous years’ numbers. 33 (44%) of those 75 lending libraries are in the United States and they received 68.2% of the total requests, the highest percentage since 2004/05. Libraries in Germany, Australia, Mexico, Canada, India, Argentina, the Philippines, Belgium and Colombia collectively received 27.9% of the borrowing requests.

The Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University (U.S.) regained its status as the top lending library this year, followed by Hatfield Marine Science Center of Oregon State University (U.S.), the Alfred Wegener Institut in Bremerhaven (Germany), the Pell Marine Science Library at the University of Rhode Island (U.S.), and the University of Hawaii (U.S.).

Overall activity across the Regional Groups is more balanced than in recent years, although EURASLIC and SAIL still conduct much of their regional interlibrary loan activity via their discussion lists, so the number of transactions via the Distributed Library does not reflect the full volume of resource sharing in those regions. The Latin American region continues to make active use of the resource sharing program while contributing a substantial amount of lending in return, including an significant percentage of requests filled within the region. Of particular note is the increase in activity in the Pacific region where members from 6 countries constituted 20.3% of all borrowing, while members from 3 of those countries contributed 8% of overall lending. (Note that these numbers include India and Malaysia which are not part of the formal geographic boundaries of the Pacific Islands Regional Group).

The complete set of data is available on the Distributed Library website via the Resource Sharing Statistics link at http://library.csumb.edu/iamslic/ill/. It includes a spreadsheet for each year that offers charts and additional analysis of lending and borrowing patterns. I encourage you to look at the 2012/13 numbers and will be glad to answer any questions you may have about the data.

Steve Watkins
California State University, Monterey Bay, Library
swatkins@csumb.edu

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July 1, 2013 · Filed under Announcements, Committee news