IAU General Assembly XXVII, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

The IAU Division XII Commission 5 Working Group Libraries business meeting at the IAU General Assembly was held Monday, 3 August 2009
Session 4 (4:00 òÀÓ 5:30 p.m.)
 
The topics and presenters were:
 
1.    The Librarian's Brave New World - Panel of Librarians; Moderated by Uta Grothkopf

Jill Lagerstrom  
-       Library as place: renovating and downsizing
-       Metrics: The new HST Bibliography

Chris Erdmann :  
-       Metrics: Facility identifiers -- how they are (or aren't) used
-    Showcasing FUSE: the ESO library full-text search system

Marsha Bishop
- Data curation: Keeping data over time
-  Brave New World: Strategies for survival
      
2.  Linking  - Alberto Accomazzi
           
 
In attendance were:
Marsha Bishop, Bob Hanisch, Uta Grothkopf, Jill Lagerstrom, Arnold Rots, Miller Goss, Alberto Accomazzi, Chris Erdmann, Marion Schmitz, rep from Cambridge University Press, Masatoshi Ohishi, a few others unidentified
 
Uta opened meeting. 
 
Bob gave overview of scope and goals for the WG:
The IAU Commission 5 Working Group on Libraries exists to foster communication and understanding between research astronomers and the librarians who support them.  Librarians have long been an essential resource to astronomers, helping to track down hard-to-find resources, maintaining access to bibliographic databases, and managing the complex finances associated with journal and book collections.  The role of the library and librarian are changing as information becomes increasingly digital in format and increasingly available on the Internet, but the librarian is no less essential than before.  We hope that by informing the research community of the librarians' needs, concerns, and aspirations, and providing a forum for hearing the concerns of scientists, that this strong partnership between astronomers and librarians will continue and that libraries and librarians will find strong advocacy regarding their financial needs from the research community they serve.
 
Jill gave presentation on HST bibliographic database and library renovations at STScI.  Questions from Alberto and Arnold.
(See LagerstromRio.pdf)
 
Chris Erdmann gave presentation on Facility Identifiers.
òÀâ     Tracking use of ESO data through published papers
òÀâ     Difficult because authors are very inconsistent in citation of facilities
òÀâ     Requires major human effort; facilitiesòÀÙ information sometimes in text, sometimes in footnotes, facility names can be misspelled
òÀâ     Common facility list (AAS, Greg Schwarz?  based on VO identifiers), incorporated into AASTeX markup
òÀâ     Authors who do list facilities make mistakes, omissions
òÀâ     Chris developed tool called FUSE to glean facilities metadata from papers (PDF form)
òÀâ     Can authors be required to include facilitiesòÀÙ tagging?
òÀâ     Arnold noted that dataset identifiers are also not being used often
òÀâ     FUSE being used by four observatories
Another challenge in metadata management!
How does it really work?  Uses list of terms, acronyms, as filter òÀÓ followed by human inspection.  Can use stop words to eliminate confusing terms like òÀÜhubble flowòÀÝ.
(See FacilityIDs_ce_ug.pdf and Fuse.pdf)
 
Marsha gave presentation on Data Curation and Strategies for Survival in the Brave New World of Librarianship.
òÀâ     Data curation spans small bibliographic records to large data sets
òÀâ     Metadata:  simple?  constrained?  combination?  extent (how many items)?
òÀâ     Record types:  highly structured?
òÀâ     Updates:  who makes updates?  under what conditions?
òÀâ     Data management:  who does it?  IT staff, library, end-user.
òÀâ     Preservation:  how long to keep data? 
òÀâ     Access:  open, closed, or combination
òÀâ     Exposure:  awareness, marketing
òÀâ     Metadata changes (e.g., facility names can change)
Data curation requires passion for data retention: librarians.
Also requires domain expertise!  òÀÜData scientist.òÀÝ
Data curation is one small part of librariesòÀÙ responsibilities.
How can libraries survive current epoch of downsizing, budget cutting/
Marion:  what happens to metadata when journals eliminate page numbers?  Replace with DOI.
(See:  IAU-Pres_DataCura.pdf)
 
Alberto:  Links in the Astronomy Data Network
òÀâ     Types of links include internal, external, computed, curated, contributed
òÀâ     Useful for attribution, aggregation, preservation, discovery
òÀâ     Links can be based on graph theory, semantic web, OAI/ORE
òÀâ     Topic clusters
òÀâ     Linked Open Data:  resource names are URIs, metadata is in RDF format
òÀâ     Links in astronomy are URLs, static, untyped, and do not use standard vocabularies; not actionable by applications
òÀâ     How to increase value of links in astronomy?  Start with observing proposals and track things forward.  OAI/ORE defines how to label the links and relationships in a publication and track the publication through its various states.
òÀâ     Datanet Data Conservancy
òÀâ     VAO collaboration:  bring semantic awareness to VO applications
òÀâ     Key technologies are RDF, LOD, OAI/ORE
Arnold:  need to identify the software used for the data processing and analysis.
(See: IAU09.pdf)

Reminder:  LISA VI in Pune, India 14 òÀÓ 17 February 2010!

24 Aug 09