40th Annual Conference: Day 4

Day 4: Wednesday September 17
Welcoming remarks from the current Officer in Charge of SPC lead the day.  He had been unavailable on Monday but so pleasantly made up for that today.  I was most taken with his point that innovation happens faster where there is lots of communication between many people and how much more difficult this is in the Pacific Region where there are small populations widely dispersed.  I also reiterate his point that climate change has huge impacts on lives so closely tied to the ocean.  

Moses Amos of the fisheries division of SPC was the keynote speaker.  He summarized the importance of offshore and inshore fisheries – while offshore may provide 90+% of a country’s GDP, the inshore fishery provides 90+% of the protein intake of the local populations.  16,000 direct jobs from fishery industry in the region.  The SPC fisheries division does scientific research, advocates for sustainability (including aquaculture), does stock assessment, monitors the fisheries, produces and dessimates information to all levels of users and management in the region.  A lively question and answer session followed the talk.

Guillermina Cosulich moderated the poster session – the posters are in the hall outside the meeting room but only one of the poster presenters is physically present – so Guillermina just summarized the posters submitted.  Kathy Heil was the only poster presenter to discuss her poster in person.  The posters were all very well done and we quite appreciate them.

Tea Break!!  Better yet, some last minute bidding in the Guin auction! Tea this morning included a platter of fancy little delights – some sweet and some savory.  One of the savory was a mini croissant with an itty bitty little sausage inside! Cute and delicious!! We were a bit shocked by one of the darling little cakes with fruit on top which looked so innocent but turned out to have a fairly high rum content!!! Meanwhile, back at the auction, I hope some more bidding happens today because I just realized how many items I’ve bid on!  Better go count my pennies…

Back in my chair to hear David Baca proposing partnerships with those persons or entites who manage the coastlines in our communities. They have created a repository called the Beach Management Information Portal.  As librarians we can offer research support and serve as a source of dissemination and storage of data and educational information to the public. Some examples are: reports, wading depths, history, sediment studies, bathymetric data, economic impacts, inventories, management plans.  If you have any or know of any such items for your neighborhood, contact David about inclusion in the repository.

Next up Kristen LaBonte explained a study she concocted and performed regarding data citation rates in GIS data in the marine sciences.  She talked about what data you should consider citing and why you should cite it..  Then talked about her study to see who, what, and where data is being cited in scientific literature.  Michigan State University library has a guide on how to cite GIS data. Kristen finished her talk with some ideas how librarians can promote data citation.  Contact her if you have questions or wait and check out her paper in the proceedings.

Last presentation of the day was Janet Webster, who with Barb Butler, looked into the present and future of Open Access (OA). There is no such thing as a free lunch!  Articles, depending on publishers, can be open (you can deposit to an IR anytime), delayed or embargo on OA, or a hybrid where there is a delay or author can pay and have immediate OA privileges.  Janet then talked about the predatory sites and publishers and introduced this site which attempts to track all such predatory and fake sites:  http://scholarlyoa.com
I was quite impressed that our friend Barb Butler has been elevated to a doctor and invited to be an editor by one of those predatory publishers – be sure and congratulate our pal Dr. Butler.  
This really is an interesting topic.  It’s not always feasible for an author to pay the publishing fees and it’s often confusing to even determine what author costs and rights will be.  As librarians, we need to be knowledgeable about the journals, about OA, and speak honestly to our constituents.
As an aside, Dr Barb Butler thinks we should start our own online journal of general interest on marine science to appeal to the public.  If you have ideas or comments, you should contact her at OIMB.

Lunch!!  Today we were blessed with chicken, a starch gratin – sweet yam, pumpkin, banana, potato – tuna tartare, stuffed tomato, rolls and butter. A tart fruit salad was the dessert offering.  So for third day in a row I’m stuffed!  Hope I can stay awake for the business and exec meetings this afternoon.

The Guin auction ended just before the business meeting.  The was a GREAT last minute scramble to get in final bids.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that  I didn’t buy everything on the tables.  I do know that I did NOT get the ketchup chips as David made a preemptive bid of 5000 cfc ($50US)!  After all the bantering and handling of product, we remember that this auction benefits a great service and Mr Baca those will be the most appreciated tasty potato shards in IAMSLIC history!!!

See minutes and reports for the wildly exciting 1st business meeting.

Second Exec Meeting, see the website.

Brian will be showing interested participants how to navigate and post to the IAMSLIC website and blog.  Joe will be demonstrating and promoting the Aquatic Commons. Steve will be showing off the Z39.50 database and Helen Wibley will be helping with folks with ASFA.

Humbly submitted by Kris Anderson

September 17, 2014 · Filed under Announcements, Conference News

Comments are closed.