Excerpted from: Frost Byte, Volume 5, Issue 4
Posted on January 29, 2008 by rgbrocs
Last week Allaina attended the AMS/ASLI annual conference in New Orleans. As you might imagine, much of the AMS talk was about hurricanes. The ASLI conference was not so focused on the weather but more about the data about the weather and the role of libraries and data centers in managing and disseminating the data. The usual suspects were in attendance, librarians and data managers from Alaska, UCAR, NOAA, NASA, and other government associations and universities.
The Wednesday keynote address was “Divine Wind: the History and Science of Hurricanes” by Kerry Emmanuel. It was standing room only for his talk, which focused on historical aspects of hurricanes and also a bit of data collection. On Thursday, Allaina was part of a six person panel discussion titled “Discovery, Access, Preservation: Libraries’ Roles in Data Services.” It may have been more appropriate for a USO representative to have been a speaker, but given the 7 minute speaking time, there wasn’t much time to say all that we do at NSIDC.
In the Exhibit Hall, Allaina and Florence met Dr. Richard Crouthamel retired from NOAA and now executive director of the non-profit International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO). He was wearing a t-shirt made by his granddaughter that said “Eat. Sleep. Rescue data.” Unfortunately, he didn’t have any for sale. IEDRO’s mission is to assist the scientific and educational communities by: locating and rescuing weather and other environmental data stored on perishable media; digitizing historical environmental data; ensuring the digitized data is available for operational and research applications to its host country as well as the international community of scientists.
Richard (Armstrong) and Allaina have been in contact with Dr. Crouthamel regarding a collection of about 1,000 historic glacier photographs. The collection of glass plates is currently stored at The Regional Museum in Maggiorino Borgatello, Puntas Arenas, Chile. He is attempting to negotiate the transfer of these images to NSIDC.
There are a couple of BAMS meeting issues, as well as IEDRO newsletters, in the library for anyone who might be interested.
Source
http://rgbrocs.wordpress.com/2008/01/29/frost-byte-volume-5-issue-4/
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