What We Do Matters: Libraries, Climate Change, and Transformation
Stephanie Ronan
Marine Institute, Galway, Ireland
The 49th Annual Conference of the International Association of Aquatic and Marine Science Libraries and Information Centres (IAMSLIC) was hosted virtually by the University of British Columbia Library and the Cyamus Regional Group, from the 23rd - 26th October 2023.
This year’s theme was based on the UN IPCC report on climate change, where the core message is:
Every bit of warming matters, every year matters, every choice matter
Taking inspiration from that, the presentations, talks, workshops, posters and activities all centered around the theme of What We Do Matters: Libraries, Climate Change, and Transformation.
Figure 1 Virtual attendees at the 49th IAMSLIC Conference, What We Do Matters
The University of British Columbia (UBC) Library presented a fully virtual conference on the Pheedloop conference platform, which created a virtual space for participants to attend sessions, view pre-recorded content, and engage with each other in real-time. Additionally, Zoom was used for all other sessions, meetings, and break-out rooms. Sessions were recorded and made available on Pheedloop for three months’ post-conference.
Hosts Helen Brown, Sally Taylor and Mathew Vis-Dunbar from UBC, along with conference convener Hannah Russell, and the organising committee did a stellar job in keeping everyone entertained and on point over the four days. This was not the easiest task when you’re dealing with an online international audience spanning across all time zones, but they made it look easy!
Figure 2 Conference selfie time, Stephanie Ronan virtually attending IAMSLIC 2023
Once the official welcome was complete, the conference kicked off with a local keynote talk from Claire Malek and Helen Brown, both UBC. They addressed teaching climate change and land use planning using historical and current resources, demonstrating how librarians and archivists can help prepare students for the challenging decisions and public planning needed today. Staying local, the talk was followed by a film from Canada’s ‘The Nature of Things’. This episode ‘Ice and Fire: Tracking Canada’s Climate Crisis’ shows that in the face of such radical transformation, measuring the true state of the planet is more than just good science, it is critical to our future on Earth.
There were plenty of wellbeing activities incorporated into the conference over the four days, reminiscent of our own EURASLIC conference earlier in the year, including Exercise with UBC Rec’s MoveU Crew, Stretch Break with Loretta, Tea Meditation, and Lightwork Meditation.
I thoroughly enjoyed the session from Derek Tan, ‘Transformational digital landscapes for Indigenous Knowledge’. I really admire his vision and skill in mapping and overlaying, via augmented reality, the Indigenous knowledge and architecture to the current space. This was one of two sessions to use the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, also referenced in the ‘Where does carbon lurk?’ workshop by Kate Elliott.
Figure 3 My Tea Meditation, following along with Erik Fausak from home
Figure 4 Drawing along with Julius Csotonyi in the ‘Learn to Draw Kelp Forests’ activity
Another great activity was ‘Learn to Draw Kelp Forests’ with Julius Csotonyi. I did not know what to expect from this session, but it surpassed anything I imagines, not only did we draw along with this wonderful national history artist, but we learned so much. It was an hour of activity where one almost accidently learned about the link between seaweeds and carbon, the predators’ and the heroes. It was fantastic.
Speaking of all things fantastic, the annual Quiz was presided over by David Baca, who also gave an excellent workshop on using storytelling to communicate. We all learned a bit more about Dave and each other in this Moth Story Hour style workshop.
Representing EURASLIC, I presented on ‘Seeing the science, visualising trends in historical data for fisheries sustainability’ which was well received. Also flying the EURASLIC flag were Tamsin Vicary and Maria Kalentsits who updated us on ‘ASFA in 2023: Transforming its services to share aquatic science research and data’.
As a member of the AquaDocs steering group, Ekaterina Kulakova, along with colleagues, gave an update on this year’s activities, including the efforts to secure ongoing funding, developments to increase the visibility of AquaDocs, and strategies to support the multilingual communities who use AquaDocs.
You can look forward to the conference proceedings being published next year, by long term editor Dorothy Barr, which will share in detail, abstracts and full papers of all the talks presented. Unfortunately, I cannot pay tribute to them all, as the quality, depth and breadth of all the sessions is too vast to cover here. I wish I could download and plug into my brain all of Amanda Whitmire’s work on using Large Language Models in data text mining, I recommend reading her paper in the proceedings as soon as you can, and don’t forget to ask Joyce Shaw and Megan Le for their curated book list! The posters are also excellent and should be viewed, especially ‘IAMSLIC conferences in changing times’ which justified why the conference was hosted virtually this year.
EURASLIC held a well-attended business meeting during the conference, where we caught up face to face, albeit virtually, for the first time since our conference in May. We also attended the IAMSLIC business meeting, presenting the EURASLIC annual report, and received the exciting news about the 50th year celebrations to be held in Alexandria, Egypt next year.
This closed out the conference, where we said goodbye to our IAMSLIC colleagues for another year and we hope to see you in person next year.
Figure 5 Speakers’ profiles are available on the IAMSLIC website and on Pheedloop