Cyamus 2015 – Seattle, WA
Cyamus, the west coast regional group of IAMSLIC, is meeting this week in Seattle. Â I am posting my synopsis of the meeting for your reading pleasure. Â Sorry, the food editorial is limited.
Thursday 3/12/15 meeting at NOAA:
Business Meeting – after reviewing the treasurers report, discussion ensued on the Cyamus website; Steve and Brian will work on cleaning up and updating the website. Â We then progressed to marketing and engaging librarians to participate in IAMSLIC/Cyamus. We are not just a marine organization as our members cover many scientific areas including: aquatic, oceanography, geology, fisheries, meteorology.
Understanding the oceans requires knowledge of physics of fluids, underwater geological processes, chemistry of water, particulates & pollutants; and what lives in the water from the bacterial to the megafaunal. Â Add in the challenges of how to measure, observe, and manipulate in an environment that is not readily visible.
Topics covered were the graying of the organization, availability of marketing materials, elevator talking points, generating a new high resolution tif of the Cyamus logo, making all these things available on the website. Â Providing information resources in support of marine and ocean sciences means bringing a multi-disciplinary expertise to work every day.
Next up was introduction of a Cyamus Conference Attendance Grant. Â In the interest of attracting new librarians to the region or the discipline, we would like to offer a grant to assist the interested to attend our conference. Â Conference timing was discussed as an issue in inviting new students. Â Decision was made to make part of the value of the award, a one year IAMSLIC membership. Â We would like the grant to be flexible in that we can offer to multiple people, vary as registration and/or travel support, but always include that membership. Â Yearly decisions can be made by Cyamus board.
Motion moved and carried to set aside $1,000/yr to support the Cyamus Rep to travel to the annual IAMSLIC conference.
Cyamus possibilities for next years conference: San Luis Obispo, La Jolla
Scientific presentation by Robyn Angliss of NOAA, AFSC, and NMML, entitled “The Use of UAVs in Arial Surveys and Beyond.”
UAV – Unoccupied Aerial Vehicles
UAS – Unoccupied Aerial Systems
Ultra cool interesting insights on getting permission and using drones to do population surveys. Lessons learned:
Identify data needs/tolerance: pick platform & payload combination
UAS are more tolerant of some types of weather
Automating the counting of animals will speed data analysis
Small swath width & slow speed of UAS have implications for survey design
Able to get COAs for work
UAS use can become routine
UAS are not always the best tool; manned aircraft and other methods are here to stay
Lunch! Â It was a gorgeous day and it was lovely to walk along the lake in the sunshine before retuning to the meeting room for the afternoon session. Â Box lunch sandwich, chips, cookie, and beverage.
More great science, this presentation from Vasily Titov of NOAA, PMEL, and NCTR on “Decade of Tsunami Wake-up Calls: Tsunami Science after 2004 Sumatra Disaster.”
There was no model in 2004 but the crude model Titov created after the earthquake showed the need for a robust model to help nations forecast the arrival and impact of a wave. Â The challenges are accuracy and speed of forecast. Â The NOAA Tsunami Forecast System of DARTs and models was fully implemented in 2013.
Titov was followed by Glen Watabayashi’s talk “Forecast: Cloudy with a Chance of Oil Spills.” Â Following the Exxon Valdez disaster, NOAA was charged with the task of forecasting oil spill impact. Â Talked about how NOAA has modeled spills from the Deepwater Horizon to train spill into the Delaware River to small boats on every coast. Â They seem to get called 3-4 calls per week. Â They give a verbal response within 1 hour and written in 3-4 days.
Joan Parker jumped in and gave an update on the Aquatic Commons. Â Currently there are about 16,000 items deposited. Â The editorial board has kept the quality of the entries closely monitored. Â Charged the group to keep eyes open for appropriate materials to include.
NOAA Orcas
Library Updates:
Clara Salazar of NOAA Northwest Fisheries Science Center is attending for the first time. They are doing some remodeling to her building which is supposedly going to be completed in 6 months.
Debra Losey finally has a new library – which was supposed to have been completed every 6 months for the past three years ( just sayin’ Clara!). Â Her collection fit first try. Â Building security is based in the library which keeps things interesting.
Sonja Kromann of NOAA National Marine Mammal Laboratory is preparing for a program review at the lab.
Nyle Monday of San Jose State shared they recently hired a new librarian he’s attempting to recruit to IAMSLIC. Â The library’s dean started a project to heavily weed the collection, especially of titles held at other Cal State campuses, and implement ebook heavy collecting. Â The project was at least temporarily halted by the faculty when departments received lists of thousands of titles for their review – which they received during finals week.
Sally Taylor of UBC spends a lot of time on collections and this past year did a great deal of weeding. Â She took about 30 boxes of reports from DFO to complete some of their runs. Â They have implemented DataVerse – a Harvard created, DDI based data management system – one instance Sally has been involved with is called Project Seahorse. Â She also plugged the True North Science Bootcamp which will be held at UBC’ Kelowna campus.
Joe Wible of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station is retiring September 2015. Â He’s already got a draft job description of his replacement submitted. Â Joe will return to Palmyra Atoll this summer for the third and final year of the project. Â This past year he got all his reprint collection reboxed.
Alissa Cherry is attending Cyamus for the first time. She’s with Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs Resource Center. Â She acquired a base collection from a marine scientist and has added environmentally focused materials that will assist the First Nations in decision making regarding environmental impacts to their lands. Â She has also recently accepted a position to be archivist and librarian for the Museum of Anthropology at UBC. Â We hope she will stick with us, we need archivists!
