2017 Call for papers

The Call for Papers for ASLI 2017 in Seattle is Open!

The 20th Atmospheric Science Librarians International Conference will be held January 25th and 26th, 2017, in Seattle, WA, as part of the 97th American Meteorological Society Meeting, which will be held January 22nd to 26th, 2017.

Preliminary programs, registration, hotel, and general information will be posted on the AMS Web site (https://annual.ametsoc.org/2017/) in late-September 2016.

The theme for the 2017 AMS Annual Meeting is “Observations Lead the Way”. With this theme, the AMS is emphasizing the importance of data-driven and science-driven decision-making to move our community and society forward. As librarians and information professionals we know the importance and benefits of access to the right information at the right time for the right audience.  Our library services and resources are just a few of an ever-growing quiver of resources for science-driven decision-making.  As the corpus of information grows and changes in format and source, how are our libraries adapting to augment other resources and how are we adapting our traditional roles of organization, dissemination and preservation to the emerging forms?  As multi-disciplinary resources, how are we acting as a cross-disciplinary conduit between generally separate realms of social sciences and physical sciences?  ASLI invites papers addressing any of the above topics.

A very useful and popular part of our program has been the “Technology Tools and Tips” session, this can be any tool or innovation you are using, and if you can describe your experiences with the technology in around 3-5 minutes, we would love to hear from you.  Talks on technology failures and lessons learned from experience are especially welcome, as are proposals from students using innovative strategies around information.

ASLI will again partner with the Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technologies to co-sponsor a Joint Session on Data Stewardship. Papers that describe innovative technological advances, curation and preservation of data, and solutions that help us understand and serve data needs in the field are most welcome.  For more information please see the joint session description below.

Please contact the ASLI program chairperson, Brian Voss (Brian.Voss@noaa.gov) if you would like to propose a session topic for this conference.

Please submit your paper proposals electronically to the ASLI Chair-Elect by September 1, 2016:  Brian Voss (Brian.Voss@noaa.gov)
If you have any questions, please call Brian at: (206) 526-6242

Submissions should include full contact information, a title, and a brief abstract of less than 250 words. In most cases presentations are 10 minutes with 5 minutes for questions.

Authors of accepted presentations will be notified via e-mail by late-September 2016. All extended abstracts are to be submitted electronically and will be available online via the Web. Instructions for formatting extended abstracts will be posted on the AMS Web site. Authors have the option to submit manuscripts (up to 10 MB) electronically by February 27, 2017. All abstracts, extended abstracts and presentations will be available on the AMS Web site at no cost.

For additional information please contact the ASLI program chairperson: Brian Voss.

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Proposal for a joint session at the 2017 AMS Annual Meeting between the Atmospheric Science Librarians International (ASLI) and the Conference on Environmental Information Processing Technology (EIPT)

PRELIMINARY TITLE – Data Stewardship: Making Historical Data Available for Modern Science

Studying long-term weather and climate trends requires the use of data from past time periods. Valuable historical records of atmospheric phenomena can be found in a wide range of document and data collections. Finding potentially relevant measurements, however, can be a significant challenge, as can making use of historical records once they are found. Historical records may lack documentation, be buried (literally or metaphorically) in un-related collections, and often exist in paper or analog formats that make computational analysis difficult or impossible.

A number of initiatives exist in the weather and climate communities to find, modernize, and make use of historical atmospheric measurements. These include the “Old Weather” project (http://oldweather.org), the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative (http://www.met-acre.org/), and a range of efforts within individual organizations.

This session calls for submissions that present current work on any aspect of this challenge, including tools/processes for: finding historical data, evaluating the value of historical collections, digitization and data format migration, crowdsourcing, and other topics. Submissions may focus on technical, policy, or organizational developments, and are welcomed from data centers, libraries, and scientific research organizations.

For questions about this session, please contact the session chair, Matt Mayernik (mayernik@ucar.edu).