Archive for July, 2015

INTERVIEW WITH AN IAMSLIC LIBRARIAN: Geoffrey Salanje from Malawi

SHARING EXPERIENCES & TRANSFERRING KNOWLEDGE

This is a new format to introduce ourselves professionally in a friendly, short and informal manner  and with a touch of some personal likes or dislikes. It will be in English language for IAMSLIC international but, my suggestion:  each one can share it in their own language for the Regional Group. Geoffrey,  from Malawi and Afriamslic,  thank you for accepting introducing yourself this way and letting us know you better !

Interview with Geoffrey Salanje (pdf version)

Guillermina (IAMSLIC President 2014-2015)

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Yikes, is this really happening?

After never missing an IAMSLIC conference since I first learned about the organization and attended my first meeting in 1981 at Scripps, I am not going to make it to this years meeting in Rome.  It is taking place during my last week at work.  It looks like a great group of folks will be attending, and you have my best wishes for a wonderful and productive conference.  I am hoping to join some of the ever growing “ElderSLIC” group and attend the 2016 meeting in Merida.

Today my retirement started to feel like it is really going to happen with the publication of the lead story in the Stanford University Libraries newsletter.  Check it out at the URL below.

Joe Wible, Hopkins Marine Station

http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/260487/54ce472df0/1693601863/e9c8e8d42d/

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STATE OF THE CLIMATE 2014 report available

An international, peer-reviewed publication released annually, “State of the Climate” is the authoritative summary of the global climate of the previous year published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center serves as the lead editors. The report is based on contributions from 413 scientists from 58 countries around the world. It provides a detailed update on global climate indicators, notable weather events, and other data collected by environmental monitoring stations and instruments located on land, water, ice, and in space.

It is available free of charge here:
http://www2.ametsoc.org/ams/index.cfm/publications/bulletin-of-the-american-meteorological-society-bams/state-of-the-climate/

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2014/15 Summary of Resource Sharing Statistics

In July of each year, I collate and summarize the resource sharing statistics from the IAMSLIC Distributed Library project. 2014/15 represents the 13th complete year of the resource sharing program. A total of 2932 requests were submitted during 2014/15, an overall decrease of 19% from the previous year. This is the third consecutive year in which the overall volume of transactions has declined significantly, from a peak of 5310 in 2010/11. A total of 49,528 requests have been submitted via the system since its inception in 2002. Of particular note this year, 99% of all requests were for copies of papers, while only 1% (31) were requests to borrow physical items.

The resource sharing program continues to be broadly international in scope, with 68 different IAMSLIC lending libraries in 26 countries receiving borrowing requests from 96 IAMSLIC libraries in 43 countries, similar to previous years’ numbers. 25 (37%) of those 68 lending libraries are in the United States and they received 62.5% of the total requests, which is close to the historical average. Four libraries in Germany received 17.7% of the total requests, while Mexico, Canada, Australia, Brazil, India, New Zealand, Argentina, and Greece collectively received 11.5% of the borrowing requests.

The Alfred Wegener Institut in Bremerhaven (Germany) retained its status as the top lending library this year, followed by Hatfield Marine Science Center of Oregon State University (U.S.), the Pell Marine Science Library at the University of Rhode Island (U.S.), Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University (U.S.), and GEOMAR Helmholtz-Zentrum fur Ozeanforschung Kiel (Germany).

Overall activity across the Regional Groups remains fairly balanced and the number of European libraries who are requesting and lending materials via the system has continued to increase. EURASLIC and SAIL still conduct much of their regional interlibrary loan activity via their discussion lists, so the number of transactions via the Distributed Library does not reflect the full volume of resource sharing in those regions. The Latin American region continues to make active use of the resource sharing program while contributing a substantial amount of lending in return, including an significant percentage of requests filled within the region. Borrowing activity in Africa and the Pacific region also continued at moderate levels, concentrated primarily in a small number of institutions.

The complete set of data is available on the Distributed Library website via the Resource Sharing Statistics link at http://www.iamslic.org/ill/. It includes a spreadsheet for each year that offers charts and additional analysis of lending and borrowing patterns. I encourage you to look at the 2014/15 numbers and will be glad to answer any questions you may have about the data.

Steve Watkins
California State University, Monterey Bay, Library
swatkins@csumb.edu

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