My Atmospheric Inbox: Where Does Data Go to Die?
What happened on June 8 2010
Today’s task took several turns before it was resolved; the rolled up data graphs somewhat larger than the actual, physical inbox. No author attributions, no journal name, no year…just the words “optical depth” and “arctic” scribbled along one side, with several peaks and valleys, and red colored caps covering some of the peaks. The branch library for MIT’s EAPS Department has been closed for one year, and we’re cleaning out the final files and leftover office bling. For now, I leave the data on my desk.
What was it about these papers that kept me from placing them in the circular bin? This was data from a now deceased, renowned professor and, no doubt, it fed the conclusions to an article or technical report now published. Where does such raw data go to die, or live again? And are the options different now than in the 1980’s when this was cutting research?
Happily the answer is yes, the options are different, healthier, and yet we need to ensure the portals and guides TO this data are straightforward to navigate. Are we able to safely land at a data site from the results of a search on GCMD or that newly designed by the NCDC?
But now fast forward, oddly enough, to my mid-day train ride home. I’m in North Station in Boston, about to embark on a half -ay vacation when I see someone familiar. Truth is stranger than fiction: this person is an older woman who once served as a research assistant to the professor/author of the data on my desk! What are the chances?!
I lose sight of her and wander the station a bit, wondering if this is how life goes for orphaned data. Then I catch a glimpse of her at the Dunkin’ Donuts counter, and she advises me to leave the graphs for her in the department office. She’s not at all surprised to learn they were alive and kicking in the library, and my mind wanders to what kind of use our professor would have made of the library, the literature and data tools of his day: printed books and journals, slide rules, planes and balloons to gather the atmospheric data, with paper maps, not Google Earth, to guide him?
In the end, this data will probably be laid to rest in an inconspicuous place, and only live on in the final publications derived from the facts they reveal. Now we find most of these publications at our fingertips, and hopefully these expressions are enough. But let’s keep talking about how we can ensure today’s data will be findable on our screens tomorrow, or just a few clicks away. We really don’t want to discard anything but the real office bling. What do you think?
Chris Sherratt
Double Check, Double Format, Double Time
MIT Libraries staff have returned from furlough, and I had intended to discuss a completely different topic for my first blog back. You know the drill: “I’ll just do this one other little thing first, it will only take a minute, and I’ll only touch the paper once.” So it was that I innocently plucked the RMetS leaflet out of my inbox, the one distributed at ASLI in January. An hour later, it’s blog material. Who knew?
All I had intended to do was verify that one of our book vendors was covering the new series Advanced Weather and Climate. When it didn’t turn up as a series search, I tried one of the titles listed on the flyer. Mesoscale Meteorology in Midlatitudes came up with the series title AdvancING Weather and Climate Science. An understandable typo if one might have been hurrying to get the word out at the conference.
However, the situation quickly became deeper and, as is usual these days, philosophical. Which format should I purchase? The electronic version available to multiple users was a mere $10 more expensive than the cloth. My e-book notification date was June 30, while the print version was dated July 14. Since today is July 19th, I feel a fleeting sense of being caught up.
But back to the problem of formats for texts. Obviously the e book will be available to all, 24×7, on the desktop, Kindle, or other hand held device. With this ubiquity, why would anyone purchase print? It’s not a collection of papers, so there is perhaps some merit in being able to easily skim and dip into the volume as a whole, or to get a sense of the author’s full take on the subject. One could even read it on a bus if one did not have a Kindle—yet. What are becoming the important factors now as we choose formats for purchase? What values do shelf space, processing costs, “skimability”, even sustainability hold when we come down to the decision as to which book to put in our shopping cart?
Today I chose to buy the Wiley’s Thermal Physics of the Atmosphere as an electronic book, wondering whether as I did so, I was shortening print runs in the future. I also chose this example as a chance for a quick email to the teaching faculty, my rather quiet, hard-working group. If they speak up, I’ll let you know.
I close again with wonder at how in minutes, our simplest tasks show forth the revolutions underway all around us. Unless I physically mark the shelf, no one will ever wander through the QC 880’s and find this book. On the other hand, if a student gets stuck at 2am and needs that discussion of thermal radiation, it will be where he or she is.
Furlough, over!
Chris Sherratt
My Atmospheric Inbox: Back to File 29?
This, friends, is a blog entry I have been dreading, but find I must write, since the information is going up on our MIT Libraries website. MGA, Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts, is on our list of cancellation targets, and it ‘s likely to go.
MGA has filled a hole for us all, but no doubt it’s been scrutinized by other libraries who are under the budget axe. My research into the situation here was painful. I didn’t want to put it up for consideration, but felt I had to, based on its low use and that fact that cutting it would save journal content. Could we, can we rely on the array of other databases such as SciFinder, CSA’s ESPM, Web of Science and INSPEC to cover the MGA scope? What about the unique publications MGA has indexed? Will our users go to these other resources, especially in an era where they want one stop shopping? The lines are short and the check out speedy at Google Scholar.
Laurel Kristick’s 2006 paper (easy to find on Google!) provides some information on the overlaps of MGA with these products. For my part, I felt a responsibility to take a fresh look at serials MGA covered that Web of Science did not, the numbers of articles in these serials and the currency of indexing them. Perhaps Christopher Reading (colleague, and MGA manager) and I should open this topic up at ASLI, take stock of the purpose of MGA and do what we can to save it in other places. Budgets are still down, and pressure remains in the library house to cut bibliographic tools to save journals. The silence of the users is deafening, and not helping the cause. Maybe yours are speaking to you?
Perhaps I’m at a back-to-the-future moment. I cut my teeth in online searching under Trudi Bellardo at the University of Kentucky. I even plugged the phone into those crazy phone cups at the University of Arizona and watched that big “terminal” spit out characters, propelling the user and me into a world of online citations. Now, in what feels like a snap of the fingers, we’ve all been searching independently for years. Has the time come to dust off that DIALOG password for File 29? Anyone have a bluesheet? Ah, of course, they are online too.
The time to Logoff is upon me. I’ve got to change my email and voicemail to an extended greeting since the entire MIT Libraries go on furlough and close for a week starting tomorrow, July 2. As I do, I feel sad that MGA, too, is poised for a furlough here. Perhaps we can find a way to restore her as a “first place” to check for this new generation. We remember the power, precision, and innovation of those searches. Now we have the Web, web 2.0, a whole host of new tools. How can we help MGA woo our atmospherics back into the far places she goes, places they may not know about, but places they may need?
Chris Sherratt
My Atmospheric Inbox: Journal Days Gone By
The Inbox task for today began with an email from which I quote in part:
The competent authority had stopped the supply of MAUSAM w.e.f. April 2009. In this regards, it is to state that the supply of MAUSAM will be made only on exchange basis against your scientific journal in English Language only, if any or you may subscribe our journal. The current rate of Annual Subscription is US $600.00 or £ 200.00. Kindly confirm.
As any well-trained librarian would do, I went to our shelves to reacquaint myself with this journal. The most recent receipt was from January 2009, volume 60. Inside, the foreign price was quoted at $288.00 USD, and this statement:
“… this is the only scientific research journal published in this part of the world in the fields of Meteorology, Hydrology and Geophysics.” MIT holds from volume 1 through 2009 of Mausam, with a small gap from 1993-1997 (anyone have duplicates?)
A quick check of DOAJ comes up empty. A Google search on the name doesn’t yield much new information on Mausam itself, though I find a picture from Pune, a colorful site for the Indian Mete Office; and the publications link on “India-Weather on Web”, which unfortunately tells me I am not an authorized person to access this page. So between this message and the lack of “competent authority” noted above, it’s time to decide the fate of Mausam at MIT, right here, right now.
The truth is, I regret this situation. We don’t have $600 to subscribe, and I am sorry that we no longer seem to live in a world where exchanges are possible , although this was one of the first forms of open access. I joined the MIT staff at the beginning of the end of these arrangements. The spirit of cooperation and sharing had been honorable. Information could be controlled, or so we thought. But staffing, budgets, and technologies have changed. Some information is free, and some not.
So the moment has arrived. It is with regret that I will be the one to lower the curtain on Mausam here. Our users will have to borrow what they need, so I hope some of you will keep your subscriptions even though funding and space pressures grows more difficult. I saved Mausam from our 2009 round of serial cuts, but I can save it no more. Goodbye Mausam. We will miss you and the elements of days gone by you represent.
My Atmospheric Inbox Featured
My Atmospheric Inbox: First find the Password
More than a year has gone by since AtmosPeer (http://www.atmospeer.net/) was introduced to librarians attending the ASLI conference in 2009. Proquest’s Gerald Sawchuk presented the idea of a social network for atmospheric scientists, one that might develop to also hold content and data. After surveying faculty, students, and others in the field, AtmosPeer was launched. And this year at ASLI, in a moment of I’m not sure what, I sheepishly volunteered to blog from my humble seat here in the library stands. Now the spring term has ended; I’m unearthing my password, and inviting you to join me.
My immediate community of atmospheric scientists here at MIT seems very self-sufficient. Because of this, I’d like to explore whether through my everyday actions, through my
“ atmospheric inbox” we can find intersections with the larger issues that face us in libraries. Can a blog help us converse and share information so that we increase our effectiveness? I think it can.
When it came time to write, I decided to approach this as a student.; after all, the empty Google search box was waiting. In just 0.10 seconds,
Other names appeared, already familiar to these readers no doubt: RealClimate (“the mother of all climate blogs”) Climate Progress, Climate Ark, Climate Feedback, plenty to choose from and only a click away. One could search Meteorology blogs or Weather blogs and soon get choked in the blogosphere.
But I am hopeful. The water, or air? seems safe enough to plunge in and add some posts from our particular perspective, even though information is saturating us too. I hope we can take the smallest atmospheric-librarian-related-task, the work that crosses our desks, virtual or physical, and examine how these serve as our own climate indicators. We want to understand the fluid mechanics of our world, the currents of change, and the storms along the way. Join me, now that I have reset my password!
Chris Sherratt
Atmospheric Pressure!
Welcome fellow AtmosPeers!
As we move in to our second month, I thought it might be worthwhile to share a little information on who has been visiting AtmosPeer and also reflect on where we may go from here – it would be great to hear from some of you on this also, so please reply to this blog with your comments.
Please remember that AtmosPeer is currently in the beta stage, so without your support the site may not make it past the Troposphere! Atmospheric pressure to succeed!
We currently have 159 members (up from 121 at the end of January), although this is not representative of the people who visit AtmosPeer since you don’t have to be a member to view most of the content. We don’t anticipate a large member base since we are a small group to begin with. Our goal is to build a core set of followers and contributors that will gain value from participation. In the month of February, for example, we had over 1,600 visits (versus 340 in January) with an average of 2.6 pages viewed (a drop from 5.4 in January). Most visitors are accessing the preprint articles and reading the news. We have just recently loaded the links to all of the conference presentations so we currently have over 20,000 document links on the site.
We are still growing since nearly 90% of the visits are ‘first-timers’. Of particular interest is that AtmosPeer visitors in the month of February were from 60 different countries (compared to only 24 in January)!
So drop us a line – respond to this blog or volunteer to host a blog of your own – or simply create a forum topic. As you can tell, we’ve had no participation on these two pages since the site was launched. Students, librarians, faculty or researchers – surely you have something to contribute?
Welcome to AtmosPeer (beta)
Dear fellow AtmosPeers:
We’d like to take this “blogportunity” to welcome you to AtmosPeer. As the name suggests, AtmosPeer is not just a portal to deliver information to the needs of atmospheric scientists. It’s very much about connecting and being connected. Share. Collaborate. Network. Whether you are in your university lab, delivering a virtual seminar, en-route to a conference or conducting experiments in a remote corner of the globe.
We urge you to visit every page and explore all the features of this web-site. WE NEED, AND WOULD LOVE, YOUR FEEDBACK. Tell us what you like, what you dislike, what’s missing and most important, what we can do to make AtmosPeer serve your community better.
We are also looking for interested researchers to host a blog on AtmosPeer – if you are interested, please send us an email on the feedback link at the top right corner of the site.
Sincerely,
The AtmosPeer Team
AtmosPeer Partners:
