Archive for July, 2017

BBC series on the Pacific Ocean

I have been enjoying the BBC film series “Big Pacific”.  Three episodes have been released so far and can be watched for free online at:
Note that they expire and will no longer be available after one month.  This means the first one goes away on July 19th.
The photography is great.
Joe Wible
Hopkins Marine Station, librarian emeritus

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27th Annual SAIL Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin

The 27th annual meeting of the SAIL Regional Group of IAMSLIC was held May 16-19 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus. Anne Moser of the Aquatic Sciences Center (UW-Madison) and Alisun DeKock of the Shedd Aquarium (Chicago) co-hosted the conference for 26 IAMSLIC-SAIL members, speakers, and guests. Madison welcomed us with traditional Midwestern weather – we needed shorts and t-shirts the first day, umbrellas the next, pants and jackets by the end. Spring weather aside, the conference kicked off with a Wisconsin-style BBQ dinner on Tuesday evening with a presentation and tour of the Aquatic Sciences Center.

SAIL conference 2017 attendees overlooking Lake Mendota

Wednesday and Thursday included two full days of excellent and informative conference sessions from members and guest speakers, the SAIL business meeting, and State of the Union–SAIL Libraries. Thursday was capped off  with a tour of the Madison capitol building by our most erudite local guide, Anne Moser, and a dinner “on the square” with a view of the capitol dome over local beer, freshly caught whitefish from Lake Michigan and, of course, cheese curds.

The inside of “the people’s house” better known as the Wisconsin capitol building.

On Friday, a smaller group remained in the city for a tour of the Aldo Leopold Center, just north of Madison. Leopold is considered by many to be the father of wildlife ecology and the US wilderness system. We were thrilled to visit “the Shack” where he did so much of his ecological observation and wrote many of the essays that comprise A Sand County Almanac.

Lupins were in full bloom in Wisconsin!

SAIL visits “the Shack” at the Aldo Leopold Center

Many thanks to our sponsors Wisconsin TechSearch, UW Press, WT Cox, Springer Nature, DEMCO and ProQuest for their support of this year’s conference.

If you’d like to learn more about this year’s SAIL conference and its sessions, check out the program at http://www.iamslic.org/sail/sail-2017-great-lakes-great-libraries

-Alisun DeKock

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