Blog Post by Sandy Campbell

Participants had lunch at the Restaurant Felli, the cafeteria in the same building as our meeting hall. It is always fun to eat like the local people. There was an interesting dish of shredded chicken and “root vegetables”, which were mainly beets. Breads and buns in Finland are always remarkable. There are always various buns with poppyseeds, and a variety of rye breads, some very dark – all very good. Hard to resist.

After lunch we heard three presentations on portals, interfaces and engines designed to make access to polar information easier. Leif Longva (UIT – Tromso) updated us on developments with the High North Research Documents https://highnorth.uit.no/ . Leif reminded us that the material in High North is harvested from the BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) metadata harvester https://www.base-search.net/. He also pointed to the need for high-quality metadata to allow for harvesting by these systems and noted the relatively low numbers of Chinese and Russian documents being retrieved. Language differences and/or metadata quality may be factors in this retrieval rate.

Daria Carle (UAlaska – Anchorage) presented on Alaska’s Discovery Portal, a cooperative project involving 3 campuses sharing a catalogue. Daria also spoke about SLED: Statewide Library Electronic Doorway, which supplies an array of services ranging from historical and archival documents, databases site-licenced for all Alaskans and tutoring serices. Find SLED at http://lam.alaska.gov/sled/

Shannon Christoffersen (AINA – UCalgary) brought us exciting news about the development of CCADI: Canadian Consortium of Arctic Data Interoperability. http://ccadi.ca/canadian-consortium-arctic-data-interoperability This consortium of 13 organizations is working to make Arctic data more accessible. In particular they are working towards goals around: a common interface for data, data interoperability, common vocabularies and data sharing standards.

Late afternoon of our first day was dedicated to the Poster session and some final presentations. Each of the four poster presenters briefly described their posters to the group and then answered questions at their poster. Peter Lund (Scott Polar) presented on making theses more available. Sue Olmstead (LAC Federal) spoke about the digitization of documents from the Antarctic Bibliography Microfiche Collection. Abdurhman Kelil Ali (UIT Tromso) described efforts to increase the amount of research data that is collected from professors, particularly those retiring, to be made available for secondary use. Marjatta Puustinen spoke about the research development at the Lapland University of Applied Sciences.

After the poster session, Bev Ager (British Antarctic Survey) presented on a variety of efforts to make the BAS Archives more open and accessible and some of the challenges in this process.

The afternoon was rounded out by a joint presentation from our busy hosts Susanna Parikka and Liisa Hallikainen, who took time out of their colloquy management duties to introduce us to LUC Library and LUC Arctic Centre Library.

Opening day of the conference has been full. We have all had a chance to catch up with our colleagues, be reminded of some of the great work that polar librarians are doing, and to learn about some new developments. Looking forward to tomorrow’s sessions.