The winter 2010 issue of the APLIC Communicator is here! Check it out for a message from new APLIC president Claire Twose, and preview of the upcoming APLIC conference, membership renewal information, three articles about library moves, and a calendar of events.

If you have comments about the Communicator, or if you’d like to write for the newsletter, please contact me or my co-editor Laurie Calhoun.

The new APLIC web site is here! The new web site uses our new logo, unveiled at the annual conference earlier this year, and we’ve made some minor changes to the make the site easier for our members to navigate.

If you have comments or suggestions about the web site, or if you can’t find something, please let us know by leaving a comment on this post or by contacting a member of the APLIC Communications Committee:

Tara Murray

Laurie Calhoun

Nykia Perez

Morgan Grimes, Laurie Calhoun, Erin Barker, Tara Murray

Several APLIC members attended the SLA 2009 conference in Washington, DC. Four of us met up at Co Co. Sala for an informal APLIC meeting.

If you attended a session at SLA that you think would interest other APLIC members, please write about it for the APLIC blog! You can post directly if you are a blog author, or you can send your report to me for posting.

The latest issue of APLIC’s newsletter, the APLIC Communicator, is now available on our web site.

This issue includes Kiet Bang’s president’s message, reports from the 2009 APLIC conference, APLIC’s new logo, and a preview of the SLA conference taking place next week in Washington, DC.

We hope you enjoy this issue, and the blog posts about the conference. Please comment on the blog, and if you are interested in writing for either the blog or the newsletter, please contact me or my co-editor Laurie Calhoun.

Following up on the selection of a new tagline for APLIC –a global network of
population information professionals, the board asked the membership to choose between two proposed logo designs for the organization. The winner
(below) was unveiled at the Business meeting in Ann Arbor on April 29, 2009. Look forward to seeing it on all of our communications soon.

We will soon be sending out a survey to vote on the new APLIC logo.  It will come from SurveyMonkey and only go to active (currently paid) members. In order to participate, your contact information must be current.  Please confirm that Kiet Bang ( bang@pop.psu.edu ) has the correct e-mail address for you (it may be different than the one you use to subscribe to the APLIC listserv).

A draft of the notes from the 2008 business meeting held during the APLIC Annual Conference in New Orleans is now available.

The appropriations bill that President Obama signed earlier this week made the US National Institutes of Health Public Access mandate permanent (as reported on Library Journal’s web site). The mandate requires research articles resulting from NIH-funded research to be made publicly available in PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.

APLIC members have been active in assisting researchers in their organizations in understanding and complying with the mandate. Lori Delaney has led an effort to compile information about the public access policies of select journals that publish population research. The journal policy database, updated this week, is available on the Carolina Population Center’s web site.

The CPC web site also includes a resource section dedicated to the public access policy. I created a similar guide for researchers at Penn State’s Population Research Institute, as have the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Research Center, the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Demography and Ecology, and the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology.

APLIC members: what are you doing to help people in your organization comply with the policy? Have you benefitted from the policy? Leave a comment on this post.

Bye, Tech: Dealing with Data Rot
CBS Sunday Morning, March 1, 2009

Sooner or later, it affects every audio recording, video recording and computer file. Contributor David Pogue looks at what happens when technological progress leaves your most precious memories and recordings behind.

Full story here and video here:

New Collaborative Online Medical Encyclopedia Launches

The Medpedia Project announced the public launch of the beta version of a technology platform for the worldwide health community. Harvard Medical School, Stanford School of Medicine, Berkeley School of Public Health, University of Michigan Medical School, and other leading global health organizations are contributing in various ways to Medpedia. The goal of The Medpedia Project is to create a new model of the way the world will assemble, maintain, critique, and access medical knowledge. It will, over time, be a repository of up-to-date, unbiased medical information, contributed and maintained by health experts around the world, and freely available to everyone.

è       http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/wndReader.asp?ArticleId=52687