Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), vol. 6, iss. 42

In this Issue:

1.)     Berlin Wall Falls – 20^th Anniversary
2.)     Candy donations
4 new items in the library

News
Today is the 20^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Here are some links about the activities today and some of the photos from 20 years ago.

Berlin Wall anniversary: leaders recreate historic walk
Berlin Wall: life in the GDR
Berlin Wall: then and now

Reminder
Thanks to everyone who donated candy to ROCS’ candy basket.  All donations are definitely appreciated.

We have free items in the library.  They are on the two book trucks in the library. On Friday, the 13^th, they will be recycled.

In an effort to reduce the library’s carbon footprint, we have turned off one bank of lights in the library .  If you need more light, please feel free to flip the switch.

Staff Report
Allaina is out of the office this week (Nov. 7-14), so see Gloria for any Archives needs.

New Items
Journals & Reports
Mariner’s Weather Log, vol. 53, iss. 2
Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Review, 2008

Books, Reprints, Other Media
Ice reports/Ice Charts Winter 2008/2009 [CD-ROM]
Voices from the Bay compiled by Mirian McDonald, Lucassie Arragutainaq, Zack Novalinga.

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC) vol. 6, iss. 41

In this Issue:

1.)     Up coming Meeting

2.)     Results of Movie Poll

3.)     Candy donations

4 new items in the library

News

On November 16^th, ROCS will be hosting the next CU Cultural Collections meeting in the big conference room from 10:00 until noon.  The first hour will be a presentation by representatives of Huntington T. Block, the university’s insurance company.  They will be presenting information specific to the cultural collections on campus.  If you are interested in listening in on this presentation you are welcome to do so.

The votes are in!  Only 13 people voted but everyone is interested in seeing the two films.  Stay tuned as we plan this event.

Reminder

Got candy?  October is the best time of year to help the library keep up the candy supply!  We accept donation of candy, cash, and also coupons.

Staff Report

Allaina will be out of the office next week (Nov. 7-14).

New Items

Journals & Reports

Polar Science, vol. 3, iss. 2

Antarctic Science, vol. 21, iss. 5

Materialy Gliatsiologicheskikh Issledovanii [Data of Glaciological Studies], #105

Books, Reprints, Other Media

Earth Observing System: Educators’ Visual Materials

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), vol. 6 iss. 40

In this Issue:

1.) “Useful” Twitter Searches – BatesInfo Tip
2.) Cast Your Vote! Movie Poll – Take 2
3.) Fall Back Next Sunday
4.) Reminders – Maps are available for check-out; Library going Green (sort of); All the duplicate maps are gone
1 New Item in the ROCS Information Center
News
Bates InfoTip
_______________________________________________________________
October 2009
Useful Twitter Searches
Seeing the word “useful” next to the word “Twitter” might seem oxymoronic to some… kind of like jumbo shrimp or deafening silence. We forget that the main complaint of Twitter — that the signal-to-noise ratio is so low — can be said of the web as a whole. Go to ten web pages at random and see how few web pages are even remotely relevant to what you do. What differentiates the web from the Tweetosphere is the existance of robust finding tools. Search engines play that role in the general web, enabling us to avoid most of the web pages that would not interest us. Most Twitter interfaces overload new users with unfiltered tweets, leading sensible people to throw up their hands and walk away.
However, I have found several real-life uses for Twitter lately, with just the search feature on Twitter. Let me know what other ones you come up with.
• Use one of the word-cloud generators (I use Search Cloudlet, an add-on for Firefox) and see what words are most frequently used in conjunction with a news event. I searched Twitter to see what words most frequently came up in the context of health care reform. Right now, the buzzwords are public option, doctors, congress and include. Interesting that insurance companies aren’t being mentioned very frequently.
• Monitor live news, as reported by people nearby. If, for example, I want to see if there’s a jump in the mentions of the H1N1 virus near me, I might search for “swine flu” OR h1n1 near:denver within:25mi
• Monitor mentions of your organization’s names, particularly those when the tweet includes an outbound link. If I was monitoring Crocs, the shoe company, I might search for #crocs filter:links
• Gather hightlights from a conference. Within a week of the conference, just search for the hashtag for the conference on the Twitter web site ( for example, I’ll soon be speaking at Internet Librarian, which has #IL2009 as its “official” hashtag). Keep clicking the “Older” Copy and paste that to a word processor, and you can easily skim through it to see key ideas. In fact, take all the words and throw them into Wordle.net, which generates a word cloud from any body of text you give it. You’ll see the dominant themes of the conference, and can identify the key speakers.
_______________________________________________________________
Bates Information Services, www.BatesInfo.com/tip.html

Second reminder! We are still taking votes for this idea. Go to issue 39 and cast your vote. It has been suggested that a showing of International Geophysical Year, 1957 – 1958: Drifting Station Alpha might be of interest to NSIDC. Paired with the Hollywood version, Ice Station Zebra might make for a fun evening. Vote in the poll to let us know if you are interested!

Daylight Savings Time comes to an end next weekend. Be sure to set your clocks back by 1 hour either Saturday night before turning in or Sunday morning when you crawl out of bed.

Reminder
1. If you need a map from our collection in room 269, feel free to check it out. There is a sign-out sheet hanging on the map cabinets. Check-out period is 1 week. Check with Gloria or Allaina with any questions.
2. The duplicate maps are gone, at least for the time being. We might find a few more as we make repairs. We’ll tweet and blog if and when we have more freebies.
3. You might have noticed the softer lighting in the library. In an effort to lower the library’s carbon footprint, we are only turning on 1 bank of lights. If at any time you need more light, please feel free to turn on all of the lights.

New Items
Journals and Reports
EOS, vol. 90, iss. 40

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), vol. 6, iss. 39

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC)
Volume 6, Issue 39
October 19, 2009

In this Issue:

1.) CDMP Proposals
2.) Cast Your Vote! Movie Poll
3.) Candy donations

15 New Items in the ROCS Information Center

News

ROCS has submitted two continuation proposals to the NOAA Climate Database Modernization Program (CDMP). We are proposing to continue to digitize the Glacier Photograph Collection including approximately 9,000 prints. CDMP will also continue working to recover glacier photograph metadata from the Glacier Photograph Index project. Last year CDMP digitized 3,699 glacier photographs. We are also proposing to continue our Discovery and Access of Historic Literature from the IPYs (DAHLI) project. We are proposing to continue our collaboration with the Carnegie Institute in order to complete the digitization of their IPY collection. Last year CDMP digitized over 9,000 pages of documents.

It has been suggested that a showing of International Geophysical Year, 1957 – 1958: Drifting Station Alpha might be of interest to NSIDC. Paired with the Hollywood version, Ice Station Zebra might make for a fun evening. Vote in the poll to let us know if you are interested!

Reminder

October is the best time of year to help the library keep up the candy supply! We accept donations of candy, cash, and also coupons.

New Items

Journals and Reports
Journal of Glaciology, vol. 55, iss. 192
IPY News 2007/08 Information Bulletin, volumes 1 – 10
EOS, vol. 90, iss. 39

Books, Reprints, and Other Formats
AAAS Report XXXIV: research and development FY 2010 by Intersociety Working Group of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

International Geophysical Year 1957/58 Drifting Station Alpha. An der Hoeven, F. G. [filmographer, prod.], Untersteiner, Nrbert [filmographer, prod., narr.] [DVD]

Polarfahrer : im Banne der Arktis ; Erlebnisse eines deutschen Polarforschers by Theodor Lerner.

Ugashik Area, Alaska – radar stereo image 198I [map]

Alaska – USGS Map E 1946 [map]

Alaska – USGS Map E 1954 [map]

Aeromagnetic gravity coverage of Alaska. USGS, Canadian Aero Service, Stpt. 1969[map]

Generalized Northeast-Soutwest geologic section B-B’ across southern Alaska, Sep. 1969[map]

Generalized North-South geologic section A-A’ across northeast Alaska, Sep. 1969 [map]

Physiographic provinces of Alaska. USGS, Sep. 1969[map]

Surficial Geology of Alaska – 2 sheets. Thor N. V. Karlstrom, et al. [compilers]. USGS, 1964[map]

Alaska Map B – west half, 199?

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), vol. 6, iss. 38

In this Issue:
1.) Columbus Day Yesterday
2.) Product Citations Update
3.) Station Alpha DVD now available
3 new items in the library

News
1.)  Columbus Day, Oct. 12, 09
Here is a little bit of information about yesterday’s holiday.  Enjoy the read.

http://holidays.kaboose.com/what-is-columbus-day.html

2.)  Product Citations Update

Gloria has been busy updating the Citations database with citations from 2009 where the authors used NSIDC data.  This information is helpful in a number of ways.  Some of the product managers post it to a dataset’s website, providing visitors to the site with information on current research.  NSIDC scientists and project managers can use the data in grant proposals, and finally, it’s nice to know that what we do makes a big impact on the global science.

3.) International Geophysical Year 1957/58: Drifting Station Alpha is now available on DVD.  http://nsidc.org/data/g02184.html

This film documents the activities that occurred on Drifting Station Alpha in the Arctic Ocean during the International Geophysical Year, 1957 to 1958. The film is narrated by project leader, Norbert Untersteiner, and chronicles the life of the team as they built their camp and set up experiments. Station Alpha was the first long-term scientific base on arctic pack ice operated by a Western country.  Station Alpha drifted in an area of the Arctic ocean located 500 km north of Barrow, Alaska USA from April 1957 to November 1958; the film covers this entire time period.

Reminder
The library is open from 7 am until 5 pm, Monday through Friday. 

New Items
Journals & Reports
InFocus, vol. 9, iss. 1
Seppyo, vol. 71, iss. 5
Gewex News, vol. 19, iss. 3

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), vol. 6, iss. 37

In this Issue:
1.) Alliance for Response
2.) Ask Colorado

News
1.)  Alliance for Response

Last Friday, Allaina and Gloria attended the Alliance for Response: A Forum for Emergency Responders & Cultural Heritage Institutions, presented by Heritage Preservation, The National Institute for Conservation.

This forum continues our journey towards a comprehensive understanding of what happens when disaster strikes and how to recover from it with as little loss as possible.  Where our WESTPAS workshops helped us create a disaster recovery plan and showed us how to salvage as much of our collections as possible, this forum introduced us to the people who are first on site when disaster strikes.  We heard from the Colorado Division of Emergency Management, FEMA, Denver Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, Denver Police Department, Denver Fire Department, and the Denver Health Paramedic Division.  The attendees came from various museums, libraries, and archives, as well as policemen and firemen from around the metropolitan area. 

Discussions centered on developing a network within our local areas and creating a relationship with our local “First Responders.”  We focused on what we can do to help First Responders help us in the event of a disaster.  All agreed that giving the local police and fire department a copy of our Pocket Response Plan an excellent first step.  One of the firemen thought taking cookies to the fire station was a great idea!

2.)  Ask Colorado

On Monday, Allaina attended a meeting of Ask Colorado referral libraries.  Ask Colorado is a state sponsored service that provides 24/7 online live reference service.  Referral libraries are specialized libraries who provide follow up research help for the questions that require it.  Currently, the referral libraries are contacted via email and respond directly to the person requesting the information.  ROCS has been a referral library for two years.  Even though we have not received any questions, participating is a no-cost, easy way to keep us in the public eye.  This year, the USGS library joined as well bringing the number of special science libraries to two.  Monday’s meeting centered around ways to make the special libraries more active participants in the program and also ways to recruit other special libraries into the program. 

If you are not familiar with this service, check out their web site at http://www.askcolorado.org/.  Many public library web sites also include a direct link as well.

Reminder

Here is a tip from the Alliance for Response workshop.  According to members of the First Responders Panel, the 911 call most often received goes something like this:  “I’m at such and such address and I need an ambulance!”  Click. 

Whenever you have to call 911, please stay on the phone in order to give the responders as much information as you can.  The above call will send all three departments – fire, EMS, police – to your door.  For a business that is trying to maintain it’s activities during an emergency, having all three departments’ vehicles at your door will only disrupt things further.

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), Volume 6, Issue 36

In this Issue:

1.) WESTPAS – disaster preparedness

2.) Archives in the Park 2009

3.) Free maps reminder

12 new items in the library

News

1.)  WESTPAS

Last week, Allaina and Gloria attended day two of the WESTPAS workshop.  WESTPAS (Western States and Territories Preservation Assistance Service) is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities to educate and train library and archives staff on disaster preparedness, response and collection salvage.  Day two of the workshop focused mainly on salvage – working with emergency recovery services, inventory control for damaged materials, necessary supplies for a response, collection salvage techniques, dealing with a water emergency, and other topics.

You will be pleased to know that your librarians have already put in place many of the tools needed to respond to a disaster.  There are a few steps yet to be established that we will need your help with and others that are already in process.  Stay tuned or stop by our office for more details.  Here is one of the exercises we did at the workshop.

Below:  A water event has hit the library, perhaps a leak from the floor above, or a sprinkler has gone off.  The books on the shelf before the water event, had about 4 inches of shelf space.  Now they have expanded and are pushing against the book ends.  Others have fallen to the floor.  What do you do first?

Clearing a path to ensure that staff do not have unnecessary obstacles to put them at risk for injury during the recovery process.  Care should be taken with the items on the floor as well.  Attempting to close a wet book will only damage it more.  Having a trained disaster team at the ready will save valuable time during the recovery process.  The team will know how to handle and how not to handle damaged materials in order to assist in the recovery effort.  ROCS will need your help in case of an emergency such as this.  Recovering wet books is a race against the clock.  As stated by NEDCC:

“Rapid response is essential for an effective recovery effort. Paper-based collections begin to distort physically immediately after becoming wet. Books swell and distort; paper cockles; inks and pigments run; coated papers begin to adhere to one another.  If environmental conditions are poor after a water problem, mold will begin to bloom in as little as 2-3 days, developing first in the gutters and spines of bound materials, and spreading rapidly thereafter.  Recovery from exposure to water is more successful if collections and facilities are stabilized as soon as possible. This means that the immediate environment must receive attention. Water must be removed; temperature and humidity controlled; and dry collections protected. At the same time, wet books and records should, in most instances, be removed from the site following accepted procedures, and stabilized by freezing.”

Below:  An air dried book with clay coated pages (glossy pages of images or charts).  The pages adhere to each other after they become wet and begin to dry.

Below:  A vacuum freeze dried book with clay coated pages.  The book is salvageable and the pages do not stick together when frozen and later vacuum freeze dried.

2.)  Archives in the Park

Last week, Allaina made her annual trek to Estes Park to assistant teach a practicum archives course.  This year, the class was an abbreviated version of previous projects.  The Estes Park Historical Museum was awarded an IMLS grant to organize and preserve some oversized materials in their map files.  The students removed the items, organized them by size, made custom folders for the items, inventoried and photographed the items, and updated their status in the museum catalog before returning them to the map file cabinets.  This was a very timely project as we are currently in the middle of a similar project with our map materials at ROCS.

Here are the students sorting the items by format and size.

Custom folders were created so that handling them wouldn’t cause damage to the items.

The museum has a small display about the history of glaciers in Rocky Mountain National Park.  Here is one of the display panels.

Staff

Friday the 25^th, Allaina and Gloria will be in Denver attending the Alliance for Response Forum at the Denver Central Library downtown.

Reminder

We have a number of free maps on the library table.  This afternoon, Allaina will take whatever is left.  Stop by and get your free map today.  Tomorrow (the 22^nd), Gloria will pull the last of the duplicate maps to give away.

New Items in the Library

Journals and Reports

Arctic, vol. 62, iss. 3

Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre (NERSC) 2008 Annual Report

Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre(India)(NERCI) 2008 Annual Report

Nansen International Environmental and Remote Sensing Centre(NIERC) 2008 Annual Report

Common Challenge: 5 year summary 2004/2008 by the Nansen-ZHU International Research Center

Polish Polar Research, vol. 30, iss. 2

Books, Reprints, and Other Media

Java Concurrency in Practice by Brian Goetz

The LaTeX Companion, 2^nd edition by Frank Mittelback and Michel Goossens

Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Eshter Derby and Diana Larsen

The KML Handbook: Geographic Visualization for the Web by Josie Wernecke

97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

Atlas of the Antarctic Deep Structure with the Gravimetric Tomography by R. Kh. Greku, et al.

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), vol. 6, iss. 35

In this issue:
1.) WESTPAS Workshop
2.) More Free Maps
12 new items in the library

News
Gloria and Allaina will attend the final WESTPAS workshop for Disaster/Emergency Response and Recovery. We will develop a formal disaster plan for ROCS and a list of “to do” items for familiarizing all of NSIDC with the plan. More on this workshop in next week’s issue. Refer to Frost Byte v. 6, iss. 28 (July 21, 2009) for more information.

As of Tuesday, the 15th, we will have more free maps in the library. Follow us on Twitter to receive a tweet when they are available.

Staff
Allaina is out of the office all week, volunteering at the annual Emporia State School of Library and Information Management “Archives in the Park”. Check out Frost Byte next Monday for her report.

Gloria is in this morning until 11 a.m. and will be in again Tuesday around 10 a.m. She will be at the WESTPAS workshop all day Wednesday.  On Thursday, she will return to her regular schedule. If you have any information needs or questions, email or instant message us.

Reminder
To send an instant message to the librarians through either AIM, Yahoo Messenger, or Windows Live Chat, just add NSIDC Library to your contacts list. If you have any problem finding us, just email library@nsidc.org and we will be glad to help.

New Items in the Library
Journals and Reports

Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90 issues 6 and 7
EOS, v. 90, issues 34 and 35
Quaternary Research, v. 41, iss. 2 through v. 51, iss. 2
Weather, vol. 64, issues 7 and 8
Journal of Climate, vol. 22, issues 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15
Ice, #149
Geografia Fisica e Dinamica Quaternaria, vol. 32, iss. 1
Polar and Glaciological Abstracts, vol. 20, iss. 2

Books, Reprints, and Other Media
Refactoring: improving the design of existing code by Martin Fowler
Groovy recipes: greasing the wheels of Java by Scott Davis
Mastering regular expressions, 3rd edition by Jeffrey Friedl
Java Script: the definitive guide by David Flanagan
TCP/ICP Illustrated, vol. 1-3 by W. Richard Stevens and Gary Wright

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), Volume 6, Issue 34

In this Issue:

 1.) Free Maps

2.) Staff out of office

 3 new items in the library

News

Gloria is in the process of sorting through the ROCS map collection.  As she comes across multiple copies of maps, they will be weeded from the collection to make room for current and future collections.  These discarded maps will be made available to staff.  Stay tuned for announcements or stop in the library to see what’s available. 

Staff

Gloria will be out of the office until the 17th of September.  Allaina will be out of the office on the 14^th and 15^th to assist teaching an archives class in Estes Park. 

On Wednesday the 16th, both Gloria and Allaina will be out of office attending the 2nd WESTPAS distaster planning class.

Reminder

You can reach both Gloria and Allaina with one email address – library@nsidc.org.  You can also reach either of us by calling 2-5171, the ROCS telephone line.  To access the library after hours, use your keypad code to unlock the door.  See Cindy if you don’t have a code.  Remember to close the door and turn out the lights when you leave.  All of the information you need to access the catalog from the library computer is posted on the monitor.  If you need assistance, let us know.

New Items in the Library

Journals and Reports

EOS, vol. 90, iss. 33

Report of the Naitonal Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Prevention #73

Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, vol. 41, iss. 3

Frost Byte (Newsletter of ROCS @ NSIDC), vol. 6, iss. 33

In this Issue:
1.) Google Squared – another Bates Info Tip
2.) Staff out of office
5 new items in the library

News
1.)  Bates InfoTip
________________________________________________________________
August 2009
Google Squared

Google Labs — the public playground where Google lets users try out new products or services that aren’t yet ready for prime time — is my secret weapon for learning about cool new stuff. My favorite new discovery in Google Labs is Google Squared. It’s a demonstration of a search engine trying to provide answers instead of just sites, and at a higher level than the simple “smart answers” you see when you search for “time in Rome” or “area code 909″. Rather, Google analyzes the retrieved pages, identifies common elements, and creates a table with the information it has compiled.

This is a fascinating tool that helps you compile facts into tables that Google builds on the fly. Hard to describe, easier to show. Go to Google.com/squared and type in a query that will retrieve a number of similar things — organic farms in Colorado, for example, or women CEOs… even superhero powers.

Google Squared generates a table of facts extracted from its index, with the items you are searching for as the left-most column, along with columns for whatever related characteristics are relevant for the topic. For organic farms in Colorado, for example, the table in the search results has columns for the name of the company, an image from the farm’s web site, a snippet of description about the farm, and columns for telephone number, location and “season.” Note that some of these columns may have few entries in them, depending on what information Google analyzed. For women CEOs, the table includes the CEO’s name, a photo, a snippet that indicates what her position is, her date of birth, and her nationality. For superhero powers, you will find the superhero’s name, a photo, a far-too-brief description of said superhero, the hero’s first appearance (in print, that is), publisher and even the hero’s “abilities”.

Interestingly, you can insert your own items in a Google Squared table, and either let Google populate the rest of the row or type in whatever content you want in that row. I added Catwoman to my superheroes table and Google filled in the new row with her photo and description; I could provide the rest of the info. For some tables, Google even suggests additional columns. For my superheroes table, I could add columns for Aliases, Alter Ego, Profession (the Joker is a lawyer, of course), and so on. You can add your own columns, as well.

You can also delete a row or column that isn’t relevant to your search. If you log in to your Google account, you can save your customized tables for later use. And you can export the table into Excel (the images are exported as URLs).

Google Squared is never going to compete with a real human’s analysis of a collection of facts, but it can be a great way to start brainstorming, as a quick way to organize the results of your search, and as a starting point for a nicely-presented deliverable for your client.

---

Bates Information Services, www.BatesInfo.com/tip.html

Staff
Allaina and Gloria will both be out of the office Thursday (27^th) afternoon to attend an all group SCG meeting.  Gloria will be out of the office on Friday, the 28^th.

Reminder
The Librarians invite you to contact them with any research needs you might have.

New Items in the Library
Journals and Reports
CEODE Newsletter, June 2009
Polar Research, vol. 28, iss. 2
EOS, vol. 90, iss. 32
The Earth Observer, vol. 21, iss. 4
 
Books, Reprints, and Other Materials
Frequently asked questions about climate change : 2008 update