Presentations

Daniel Brendle-Moczuk, University of Victoria

Pre-Consumer Plastic Pellets (Nurdles) on BC's South Coast:  Keeping Our Eye(s) on the Tides & Winds to Determine Areas of High Accumulation

Since 2016 along southwest British Columbia coasts and waterways, including Vancouver's Fraser River and on the shores of the Gulf and Vancouver Islands, we have sampled, quantified, tracked and mapped pre-consumer plastic polymer pellets used in the production of plastic products. Plastic pellets do not readily break down and they soak up contaminants. Aquatic animals sometimes mistake the pellets as food, which many accumulate in their digestive systems causing injury and possible death due to starvation, and plastics might possibly move up the food chain. Our previous research identified the specific plastic polymer types found. Since then, utilizing field observation and tide and and wind data from Environment Canada, Fisheries and Oceans Canada and Meteorological Aerodrome Reports from the US National Weather Service, patterns of the conditions necessary for nurdles to arrive on shore and areas of high nurdle concentrations were established.

Kristen LaBonte, University of California, Santa Barbara

Exhibit and Public Event Planning: Inspirations and Lessons Learned

Fifty years ago, the Santa Barbara area suffered a massive oil spill caused by a blowout below an offshore oil rig as workers were drilling a new well. In the aftermath of the disaster and its cleanup, local environmental groups were formed, new environmental legislation became law, an environmental studies program was founded at UCSB, and Earth Day was born. Today, as the world is confronted with rising challenges of climate change, how can we again come together as environmentally responsible communities to counter regressive political agendas and inspire new green waves of activism? This talk will focus on how the UCSB Library framed these issues through library exhibits and public events.

Katie Lage, MBARI & Moss Landing Marine Laboratories

Combining Forces to Teach New Marine Science Graduate Students

In Fall 2018, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories offered graduate students a “combo class,” which brought together the Library Research Methods in Marine Science course and the Scientific Writing and Communication course. Building upon the complementary nature of these courses to enhance student engagement and learning, the two faculty members, one a vertebrate ecologist and one a librarian, merged these classes. In this presentation, I will frame the why and how of the merger in the context of the science information lifecycle, feature successful enhancements to our graduate student information literacy learning, and present opportunities for further integration.

Mary Markland & Rachael Davis, Hatfield Marine Science Center, Oregon State University

Spacing Out

Oregon State University has a new marine studies program falling into place, which will lead to more students participating in HMSC classes. We anticipate that the Guin Library will receive increased usage due to these new students. How can a library create more student space while dealing with a finite building footprint? Guin Library is exploring a variety of collection projects that will ultimately lead to a decrease in floor space devoted to the print collection and an increase in seating options.

Beth Rogers, Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre

Work Breakdown Structures: An Effective Tool for Organizing and Documenting Project Work

In 2013, BMSC initiated a major library review and development project, with work to be completed over the next 5 years. A Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) was used to organize and document project work - a strategy borrowed from the field of project management. This presentation will describe how to create Work Breakdown Structures, using the example of the library review and development project to demonstrate their effectiveness.

Sally Taylor, University of British Columbia

Data from the Forest and the Sea: Efforts to Curate 20 years of Student-Collected Data at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre

As part of a sabbatical in 2018, I worked on a project to curate select data sets at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The data was collected from two study sites (Wizard Islet, and forest plots near the mouth of Grappler Inlet) over a 20-year period by undergraduate students in the Coastal Biodiversity and Conservation course. I will describe how I prepared the data sets and documentation and illustrate the challenges that arose. I’ll explain why we chose Dataverse as the repository and highlight some aspects of the metadata. I’ll conclude with a discussion of how we can improve our efforts to preserve research data for the future.

Mathew Vis-Dunbar, University of British Columbia Okanagan

Open Science and Undergraduate Education at UBC Okanagan

The Problem: In 2005, John Ioannidis stated, "It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false". Since asserting this, a growing body of meta-science research has substantiated this claim, causing uncertainty about the trustworthiness of published scientific findings.

The Solution: Open Science refers to a broad, transdisciplinary movement that aims to open up research processes to promote the integrity, reproducibility, and value of scholarly work. To date, the Open Science movement has focused on awareness at the graduate and post graduate level.

The Project: Integrate Open Science tools and practices into the undergraduate curriculum. The Library and faculty in Biology at UBC Okanagan have launched a pilot program to shift classroom and lab

practices at the undergraduate level to adhere to best practices as articulated through Open Science, from the importance of all findings, to workflow management, documentation, integration of open technologies, avoiding bias, data management practices, and information dissemination that is open and diverse, engaging in citizen science and knowledge translation.

Aim: Have undergraduate cohorts that are well versed in the best practices of Open Science, so much so, that to practice Open Science is as habitual as donning a lab coat and safety goggles when entering

the lab.

Amanda Whitmire, Hopkins Marine Station, Stanford University

Subversive Gatekeepers: Developing Methods for Enabling Remote Access to Hidden Collections

Libraries at several academic marine research stations on the West Coast of North America hold large collections of student research reports. These collections include several decades of unique field observations about environmental conditions, species and populations recorded over a span of nine decades. Each collection is important within its local context, but taken collectively these papers represent an extremely valuable corpus for conducting historical ecology research. In most cases, the holding library does not have permission from the student authors to make their work available online. Since libraries are limited in being able to offer open access to these materials, what other mechanisms

exist or could be developed to make these collections maximally discoverable and useful? Is it possible to facilitate exploration and analysis across this corpus without providing direct access to the content? In this presentation, we will review some of the potential methods to support research across distributed, closed digital collections and share some results on proof-of-concept testing with our own collections.

Kristin Culp, ProQuest

Primary & Historical Sources Provide Insights to Enable Researchers to Impact Their World

Using ProQuest resources to support libraries and information services in: marine and freshwater science, oceanography, fisheries, meteorology, education, policy and more. 

Poster

Teresa de J. Barriga Ramírez, José Luis Ortíz Galindo and Laura M. Pérez Rojas, CICIMAR-IPN, La Paz, Mexico

Strategies to Survive Alone

My thoughts, and perhaps the thoughts of other information professionals, are occupied by the rise of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTS) and the library’s role as a provider of information services for a specific, yet diverse, community. Because of the use of ICTS, users are not required to go to the library and the librarian becomes less visible among her community. However, ICTS also provide opportunities to discover new ways of using and experiencing knowledge. The present work aims to explain how marine an d aquatic sciences librarians can overcome the difficulties of this new reality through the construction and strengthening of interpersonal relationships, staying visible within their communities, respecting the essence of librarianship and staying current.