Palmer Station LTER SiteFlash - July 2002 - Karen Baker

PALMER INFORMATION MANAGEMENT (IM) supported the annual January cruise, 
the seasonal October to March station work, and a second sea ice process 
cruise (Sep01) studying late winter ice.  The 3rd Palmer LTER renewal 
proposal was written, submitted and funded this year.  Communications for 
the Palmer team were supported with electronic facilitation of project 
work web pages for the renewal proposal, data sharing and modeling.  
The site bibliographic database was updated with Endnote migration 
ramifications explored.  Collaborative work with UCSD library, 
communications and SDSC departments created partnerships providing 
support for the information management component.

LTER Network activity included attendance at a variety of meetings and 
workshops including two LTER Metadata workshops (Jan02 and Jun02) in 
Phoenix at the CAP site to learn about the Ecological Metadata Language 
and related software support products. The SCI2002 6th World Multi-
Conference on Systematics, Cybernetics & Informatics, on July 14-18 
in Orlando included two LTER sessions entitled "The Ecoinformatics 
Challenge: Meeting Ecological Information Needs for the Site, Network, 
and Community" co-chaired by John Porter, Karen Baker and Susan Stafford. 
The meeting created a venue for cross-domain exchange as well as 
publication of twelve reviewed LTER manuscripts for the conference 
proceedings. Palmer LTER coauthorship on three papers included 
description of the Network Information System (NIS), the site description 
directory module (SiteDB), and a common information management framework 
(CIMF).  A one week visit to the Luquillo site (LUQ) enabled a site 
information exchange and CIMF manuscript development.  SiteDB efforts 
culminated in migration and installation of the module at the LTER Network 
Office using SQLserver software with perl for web interface.

A post graduate research (Helena Karasti) arrived for a one year IM/social 
science study 'designing an infrastructure for heterogeneity of ecosystem 
data, collaborators and organizations'. She is carrying out LTER ethnographic 
field work with interviews and participatory design elements.  This work 
has been shared with the LTER community through presentations at the IM 
Executive Committee meeting (SDSC, Feb02) and at the LTER IM meeting in 
Orlando (July02). 

EDUCATION OUTREACH and information management partnership continue with 
journaling efforts contributed by Palmer LTER volunteers, students, and 
technical staff participants. Coordination with the Boy Scouts created a 
scout internship (Jun2002) prior to Antartic deployment. Individual events 
such as the Girl Scout 'Women in Technology' were sponsored. Palmer LTER 
participated in the LTER education committee meeting (Mar02) at Sevilleta (SEV).

COMPUTATIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE for the Palmer LTER continues within the 
Institute for Computational Earth System Science (ICESS) at UCSB.  Recent 
upgrades include: Windows PC networked workstation upgrades to XP; updates 
of the 50GB of Palmer LTER storage network, security upgrades in recovering 
from computer attack events, webserver and database tests as well as solaris 
installation on a pc to prototype ICESS infrastructure expansion in the 
interest of stability, security and broadened system support. Software was 
reevaluated focus on the open source trio: Apache, MySQL and Php. Within 
the database environment a survey, a dynamic glossary  and multimedia 
galleries for photos and video clips were developed. Finally, this year a 
website redesign was initiated using a three tier template format.