2009 AERO Conference, September 24-25, University of Minnesota, St Paul
In attendance were Louise Letnes (University of Minnesota), Marilyn Graham (USDA Economic Research Service), Margaret Merrill (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University)), Barbara Hegenbart (University of California at Davis), Julie Kelly (University of Minnesota), Katherine Faulkner (University of Maryland), Hui Hua Chua (Michigan State University), Rebecca Bernthal (University of Nebraska), Wayne Olson (National Agricultural Library), Jeff Kushkowsi (Iowa State University), Donna Daniels (University of Arkansas) , Mary Dugan (Purdue University), Susan Garbarino (University of California at Berkeley)
On Thursday Sept. 24, we met at the University of Minnesota Magrath Library. We were welcomed by Bill Easter of the University of Minnesota, Department of Applied Economics.
Each member did a self-introduction for Dr. Easter and, if appropriate, included a very brief statement of any news to share. These included: Louise: reported on AgEcon Search; on behalf of AgEcon Search she attended AAEA in China. Marilyn: works in the information services division of USDA ERS, in the resource center. Julie is working on a project to collect restaurant menus; she also gave a description of the St. Paul campus. Hui Hua: her department has had a name change to Agriculture Food Resource Economics. Jeff: his areas include Entrepreneurship. Mary: her library is undergoing a renovation and Phase 1 with a LearnLab was recently completed.
EthicsShare
Kate McCready and Cecily Marcu of the University of Minnesota Libraries presented a report on EthicsShare, a research and collaboration web site for scholars working in the field of ethics. The slides for this presentation are online here at the AERO website (See power point presentation). EthicsShare is a collaboration of the Center for Bioethics, Libraries, and the departments of Computer Science and Engineering. It is funded by the Mellon Foundation, the NSF, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. The virtual research environment components include content access (discovery tools), community, and governance (policies, privacy). It was begun with the Scholarly Communications Institute (within Bioethics) held in 2004. In 2005-2006 the University of Minnesota libraries studied research and methods of scholars, the helping hands project. EthicsShare only includes articles on bioethics; there is no money to buy content. PubMed (free on the Internet) includes articles on bioethics. They would like to include other areas with ethics concerns but there are no databases comparable to PubMed for other areas of study.
Born Digital
Born Digital (See power point presentation) extension project – presented by U. of Minnesota Librarians Linda Eels, head of the forestry, entomology, and wildlife libraries and Leslie Delserone, agriculture. This presentation is available online, and includes slides plus audio.
Lunch with Prof. King
This talk was based on The Omnivore’s Dilemma, a book by Michael Pollan, which he used in a freshman seminar. He read several sections of the book and then related them to the teaching of the seminar. Since 2007 when he first taught the freshman seminar, the prices of soybeans and corn have gone up and then down again. He is now looking at the beef industry and talked about Pollan’s description of buying a steer. He gave students documents that contrast with what is described in the book, e.g. from the Beef Counsel. Pollan traced 3 meals back to their sources and also traced some organic food back to their origins, the grass-based beef/polyphase farm. There are reasons for direct marketing but the question must be asked: Is it sustainable? Just realize what you’re doing and look at other ways of getting your food. For example: co-ops, He is currently doing a study on distribution and production of beef, blueberries, leafy greens, and fluid milk in other parts of the county. They are also looking at a direct market case and then local food distributed in a supermarket. These are mainstream supply chain case studies. The question after reading the book is ‘now what?’ The author’s other book is In defense of food, but is not as good. It comes back to ‘what should I have for dinner?’ Changes will come through our demands. Local foods movement will lead to some changes. Health challenges are related to what we eat. The important thing is to get people talking about these issues.
The Food Industry Center (TFIC)
Koel Ghosh presented a program on TFIC. The Center has changed from its beginnings in 1995; it is now a university-wide center. See its web site http://foodindustrycenter.umn.edu. It was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It is part of a network of centers across the country. Each center studies a different industry and these are listed at http://www.industrystudies.org. Funding was stopped by the Sloan Foundation in 2005 so it transitioned to private funding and grants. The goals are to identify major issues, generate industry-wide awareness, serve as a portal to resources, provide venues for addressing issues, and support research. They educate, provide outreach, and design curriculum—preparing leaders of tomorrow. The departments involved are the school of management, college of agriculture, environment and food. The leadership board meets twice a year; their activities are publications, public presentations, research, and education. The scope of research is the entire food chain. Some main initiatives are homeland security (food safety and food defense), healthy foods and healthy lives (obesity problem), developing leaders for tomorrow. Research projects are through The Food Industry Center. She discussed some past and present research projects. On the horizon: economically motivated adulterated food, private label versus brands, food safety, globalization of food firms, food health and healthcare, carbon regulation impacts, sustainability – water and the beverage industry, technology in foods and food packages.
HarvestChoice
Phil Pardey, (University of Minnesota, Applied Economics, Director of International Science and Technology Practice and Policy Center) presented a report on the HarvestChoice Project. It got started with a grant from the Bill Gates Foundation; they were interested in feeding poor people by improving access to information. They asked for $1.9 million but got $5 million for Phase 1; they may be funded again. Emphasis is on sub-Saharan Africa but the implications are global. They are trying to get a consortium of companies. See their web site http://www.harvestchoice.org/about/at_a_glance. They are trying to facilitate collective action. The web site has a People link and an on online Project Log. They put together data, (lots of households and markets information), present information for strategic decision making. They get remote sensing data and ground sensing data, household and market level data. The Gates Foundation is interested in targeting those who would be impacted by intervention. They apply crop models for profitability, revenue maximizing, they look at production, systems, distribution. They also measure the impact of climate change on crop yields and look at crop responses. They get data from NASA, from folks in the UK. They are also looking at the effects of pests and diseases on crops in Africa, working with survey data from experts around the world. They are getting survey data and other information from Louise Letnes. Evaluation assessment from data, map information, georeference spatial data, boundary files, population data. The site is for analysts, decision makers who invest… e.g. a country agency purchasing fertilizer.
Central Career Resource Project
Mary Dugan talked about the Career Wiki at Purdue University. The Management and Economics Library collaborated with other departments to make career services for students available in one place on the Internet, hosted by the Library. A major objective was to better prepare students for interviewing with companies, specifically to give them the tools to learn about the company before an interview, and this is done by linking from the wiki to the company information databases subscribed to by the Library. The first career services to join were the Krannert School of Management and undergraduate career services, with the College of Agriculture added soon after. The library has been participating in Career Fairs, including the one for the College of Ag. The Career Wiki also includes career guidance, resume help, and other job seeking tools.
Ranking of Agricultural Economics Journals
Hua Hui Chua presented her project of a review of recently published Ag Econ journal rankings. Journals are still the most heavily-used resource for research in Ag Econ. She told about the literature review of articles on rankings. She also discussed the major ranking indices: ISI impact factor is often used but includes few of the journals in which ag econ profs publish, so more than ISI is needed. Eigenfactor Score and H-Index are other indices. See her slides for more information about these. New resources for journal ranking include Google Scholar citation database, SCOPUS, modified PageRank technology, SCIMAGO, Journal-Ranking.com, and http://www.harzing.com. The major challenge continues to be the interdisciplinary nature of Ag Econ. Hua Hui’s slide handout included a list of references on Ag Econ journal rankings and new tools.(EXCEL file AFR Ejns)
Electronic journals: obligations, options and opportunities
Susan Garbarino presented on e-journals; the slides for this presentation are online here at the AERO website (See power point presentation). Our obligations as librarians are to archive, index, and provide access. We are expected to provide electronic access to current issues but space and cost continue to be issues. An extreme reaction is to cancel all print and hope “someone” archives it, or to keep getting print because e-access is not archival; a mixed approach is to rely on campus e-access for current issues but keep getting print as archive or get print until it’s in an online archive. Considerations are access, archiving, print vs. online, and indexing. An option is to provide an electronic table of contents of selected journals, send to selected faculty and grad students. You can collect faculty citations via Refworks; create a bibliography for faculty reviews; check databases regularly and cull by author. From these, link to e-versions of papers in catalogs. Susan has created a portal for faulty to search for their papers and articles. A great concern is for materials that are born digital. Susan’s presentation was followed by a discussion on binding, last copy responsibility, publisher bundling of journals, and rapid ILL.
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The business meeting was held at dinner. The next meeting may be hosted by Donna at the University of Arkansas. Mary will continue as the Secretary/Treasurer, the new co-presidents will be Louise and Julie. Barbara put a callout for someone to be the AERO representative to the AAEA; Mary volunteered. Julie Kelly brought up the idea of AERO starting a working paper series.
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On Friday September 25, we met at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska.
Keeping Current – Methods for Tracking Current Issues
Julie Kelly presented on faculty current awareness; the slides for this presentation are available online here at the AERO website . In early 2009 the University of Minnesota had a library task force that studied the issues of current awareness and personal information management. The issues include more complicated tasks and incompatible systems. We can adapt familiar tools such as email and bookmarks, but paper is preferred for some things. A one size fits all solution is not likely. First step was to find background information. A literature review gives limited results, librarian roles are seldom mentioned. In a systematic evaluation of tools the guiding principles were to see if they were efficient, simple, stable, and effective. An informal survey seemed to show the problem is more in being disorganized rather than not keeping up. Recommendations are to form a group to move forward, build a tool kit of resources for library users and staff; identify current experts in current awareness tools and cultivate more. Support a range of citation managers that users have chosen to adopt; up to this point they have chosen to support Refworks, not EndNote or Zotero. Next steps are to work with other campus units and create new current awareness widgets. Make it easy to get e-copies of paper documents. Run pilot projects in 2-4 departments to embed links to current awareness tools in the website; Yahoo pipes CA/PIM. Work with vendors to find a citation manager solution for alumni; they need an e-book reader and mobile device staff expertise. Provide new book lists. A discussion followed on the subject, including the difficulty of organizing and tracking PDFs; affinity string tracks interests and items are pushed to the person; this is also available from Blackboard at the portal page; some display new book lists on the library home page but programmers have a hard time making this work; some run searches and send results to faculty but this requires intensive manual work; there are photocopiers that will scan and put the copy on a jump drive.
Tour, lunch, gift shop
We were treated to a guided tour of the beautiful gardens of the arboretum, going by bus because the grounds are so large. The guided tour travels on a scenic road, Three-Mile Drive, and the guide described the historical and experimental areas. We had lunch on our own and then did some early Christmas shopping.
Andersen Horticultural Library
Kathy Allen, U of Minnesota Librarian gave us a tour of the library, including the archive of rare books. It is a reading and reference library specializing in horticulture and botany. The Special Collections include a Nursery and Seed Catalog collection.
Maintaining Contact With Faculty
Margaret and Mary let a roundtable discussion on the issue of connecting and keeping up with faculty. Everyone has a desire to keep up with the research of the faculty but there is no definitive solution on how to accomplish this. At the University of Minnesota they track the publications of their faculty; this is also done at California. Donna reports that she meets all her faculty, visits them regularly, and works with their grad students. At Iowa State they also meet new faculty, and they have office hours in the college of business in a conference room. Margaret has an office in the college and is there for half of her time. Librarians all go to teach classes but it would be best to spread the teaching out over a semester instead of a one-off. Susan’s library is in a departmental setting, she reads articles by her professors and then when she see them she can talk to them about the articles. At Iowa State Jeff uses social networking tools to send out notes. Suggestions are to go to campus events and be seen, call faculty at the beginning of each semester to find out if they want the textbook on the reserve shelf, send out an e-newsletter once a semester to remind faculty of library services. M&M passed out a bibliography which is also available here at the AERO website.
Open Access Journals in Agricultural Economics
Susan and Julie presented on open access (OA). OA is more complex, some new models require authors to pay a fee. The National Institutes of Health mandate requires OA. Tenure requirements do not acknowledge OA journals. Susan discussed OA activities at the University of California. The University of California gives money to faculty to publish in OA journals. Their compact for OA publishing equity says that universities commit to the timely establishment of durable mechanisms for underwriting reasonable publication charges for articles written by its faculty and published in open access journals. It is a real commitment. See the University of California Office of Scholarly Communications http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/ . They are reshaping scholarly communication. The University hit a deal with Springer where the University will pay the publisher fee and this may become the new model. This is a brand new deal wherein copyright stays with the author.
Julie discussed AgEcon Search. Authors want to know if they can put their papers on their institutional repositories, their websites, etc. She is working on a letter to authors about the policies of top journals. She has asked for advice on making the letter better, more useful. Pre-pubs can go into institutional repositories, or they can change the title, or use working papers. There was also a discussion of ebooks. NetLibrary is not popular. It seems you can only choose one platform, and maintenance fees are killing us. Ebooks have many of the same problems as ejournals.
Plant Info Online
Kathy Allen, University of Minnesota Libraries, gave a demonstration of Plant Info Online. It was a subscription service but now is free. It started with index cards with information for shipping plants then went to d-base. They go through horticulture and garden magazines and index everything that is in color and that they can identify, e.g., not just “lily”, they try to include the common name and horticultural name. It is more an index of images so they also index ads. They get about 5000 hits a day. It includes cross references. Names can be hard to identify so establishing taxonomic authority is difficult. They include vegetables as well as ornamental plants but these are aimed at the gardener rather than farmers.
Updates
Barbara digitized old cost and return studies and she is getting them onto the website http://coststudies.ucdavis.edu/archived.php. These are useful to compare labor and material costs such as equipment, production methods, technology over the years. The resource is good for anyone to know what is necessary to begin growing a certain crop, e.g. old varieties that are now popular again, e.g., heirloom tomatoes. It is also good for historical labor cost and water cost. It is free, no charge for downloading for now.
Barbara and Susan are hoping to digitize agriculture commissioner reports. They are in different formats, fiche, PDF, paper, and come from all counties in California, beginning in 1920. Some counties have done part of this. Some don’t archive. This is important because of the consistency in how the data was collected, e.g. the dollar value of crops. There are applications for land use studies. They need to find an online repository where they can put this when the project is done. They hope the Giannini Foundation will house it on their server. If not, then maybe USDA ERS, or the state department of agriculture. They want wide access and to have several access points. The vendor doing the digitization is BMI Imaging. Susan wondered if other states have these reports and if they are being archived.
Wayne had an entire alphabet of updates on the NAL. Addresses (ip) are changing, so they currently can’t show anything on the website. Agricola and xml, the database converted to xml, this will make Agricola easier to use, fast and helpful to users outside library. It will be opened up to OAI crawlers and search engines like Google. Agspace still hasn’t been launched, it is 2 parts, the NALDR (National Agricultural Library Digital Repository), old reports that have been digitized, over 540K pages; and the DDR, digital documents repository, over 30k. Articles are by USDA authors but some have co-authors so there may be copyright issues. You can search Agricola for ERS and Agspace and get hits. More indexing for AGRICOLA will be done offsite in FY2010, than in past years. Agnic has a new website. Bathrooms: they got $7.4 million to redo bathrooms in the Tower and will also replace the windows. Director: they are looking to hire a director, it is down to 10 applicants, and they may have someone hired by January. Hidden collections of the NAL: they have found 33 that are not included in Agricola, they may be added. Information centers have dedicated staff, e.g. animal welfare, food and nutrition center, rural information website, water quality, alternative farming systems. Their Twitter account has a large number of followers.
Marilyn updated the ERS. ERS is on Twitter to promote publications. ERS is moving in 2011, they will have a resource center but she is not sure of the size. They are changing as many journals/serials as possible to e-format.
Louise and Julie gave an update on AgEcon Search: 30 journals, 215 groups contribute, 35K + papers. Average downloads per month is 139K; 40 countries. They get very good results from attending conferences, make good contacts. It is now on Repac and a partner in SPARC. They did 20 minute clinics on topics such as what citation manager is, what databases to use for agricultural economics, using Google, over 100 attended each in China. You can get a list of journals at the website. They have added Latin American journals, Nigeria, Sweden. They now have statistics for each paper and journal. They have funds from the Minnesota Foundation Fund. Future hopes are for more small journals, subject repositories, the African assn of Agricultural Economists meeting in South Africa, AAEA Centennial meeting in Denver, more in Africa, Asia, and to follow up the China contacts, add Twitter, add data sets. We can help by encouraging our departments to submit papers and to notify us of groups, conferences or journals they should recruit.(See power point presentation)
Julie reported that at the Publications meeting at AAEA they chose Oxford for their publications.
Louise reported that the ESR does not know what to do about data curation.
Donna told about a “quick fire challenge” where she talks to a student group and they have 15 minutes to research a company or industry, e.g. chicken paws. Sometimes she changes the time allowed, see how well they can do on the fly. Don’t tell about the sources first, makes it fun and challenging.
Mary told about a weekly feature she started called Database of the Week that is getting positive feedback.
The forms to request travel reimbursement from the Farm Foundation were passed out.
