43rd Annual Conference (April 2010)

Population Information Roundup: Tools, Experts, and Networks

photo courtesy Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau

photo courtesy Dallas Convention & Visitors Bureau

Hyatt Regency Dallas
Dallas, Texas
April 12-14, 2010

Conference Program » Links

Program

Monday, April 12, 2010
1:30-3 pm

Tour: Geomap Geological Data Center

GEOMAP®, a for-profit company, is the largest supplier of geologic mapping services in the United States. With four locations in Texas, they provide leadership in the field of petroleum geology and boast having one of the finest collections of historical well logs in the U.S.

3-5 pm

APLIC Board Meeting

All APLIC members are invited to attend.

Tuesday, April 13, 2010
8:30-9 am Registration and Continental Breakfast
9-10 am

Trends in Research and Practice: Digital Curation and Repositories
Dr. William Moen, University of North Texas

This presentation will introduce the audience to emerging concepts related the careful stewardship and management of digital information and digital objects. Digital curation is one of the key frameworks for thinking about digital information through its entire life-cycle: from creation to acquisition and storage to access and use to ongoing preservation to ensure long-term availability and reuse of the information. Managing digital information requires appropriate technology infrastructure, and the presentation will describe and explain the role of web-accessible digital repositories for collection building and data curation. Organizations trying to manage their valuable digital assets will need to address a range of policy considerations in addition to concerns of the technology infrastructure. Such policies range from collection development (what should be collected; what needs to be preserved for long-term access) to access and use (who can access the information; do some users have limited rights to use the information and objects in specific ways). Although the technologies associated with digital curation and digital repositories will be discussed, the presentation is intended to reach a broad audience; it is not intended to be a technical tutorial on the building of digital repositories.

10-10:30 am Break
10:30 am-noon

The MMP/LAMP: After 25 Years in the Making
Karina Velasco, Princeton University

This presentation will explore the ethnosurvey that the MMP/LAMP use as the main tool of research, and the datasets these two projects offer in the countries of Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Peru and Colombia. We will also explore what tools we offer on our websites and how researchers can gain access to our datasets.

Noon-2 pm Lunch Break
2-3 pm

If You Build It, Will They Log In? Collaboration Tools and User Behavior
Allison Burns, Family Health International
Kay Willson, Futures Group
Tara Murray, Penn State

The panelists will discuss their experiences implementing various collaboration tools (wikis, Sharepoint, and Plone) in their organizations and share lessons learned about organizational change and user behavior.

Session summary from the APLIC Blog
3-3:30 pm Coffee Break
3:30-5 pm

APLIC Business Meeting, Election, and 2010 Annual Meeting Planning

All APLIC members are encouraged to attend and participate.

7-9 pm

Banquet at Local

The banquet is included in your conference registration.

Review of the banquet from the APLIC Blog
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
8:30-9 am Continental Breakfast
9-10:45 am

The World of the Demographic and Health Surveys
Trevor Croft, ICF Macro

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are important tools for understanding population and health issues and their trends in countries throughout the world. Funded by USAID, and conducted in collaboration with health and statistical offices within the countries, DHS has expanded from data collection on family planning and reproductive health to malaria, HIV/AIDS, nutrition and other critical population issues. This session will include a brief history of DHS, the state of DHS today, and a look into the future as the program incorporates new technologies into data collection. We’ll examine how data analysis and dissemination opportunities have expanded from printed books to web-based tools such as STATcompiler, STATmapper, and the HIVmapper, as well as the development of newer survey tools and analysis such as the Service Provision Assessments, Malaria Indicator Surveys and AIDS Indicator Surveys. We’ll also discuss some of the policy implications and how the DHS relates to the Millennium Development Goals.

10:45-11 am Break
11 am-12:30 pm

Census 2010 and the American Community Survey: What Population Librarians Need to Know
Elana Broch, Princeton University

Since its inception in 1790, the U.S. census has been a decennial count of people in the United States on Census Day. By 1940 separate short and long forms were introduced in order to get a highly accurate count (based on the short form) and detailed information (long form).

Long form statistics become outdated by the end of each decade. In an attempt to obtain data more frequently, the Census Bureau has replaced the long form of the decennial census with the American Community Survey (ACS) . There are major differences between the long form and the ACS. (Everyone will be still be completing the short form on April 1, 2010.)

Join us for a review of the Census program as we knew it , an introduction to the ACS, and a discussion of the comparability issues and interpretive challenges that are sure to arise. While the complexities of the census landscape are increasing, there is no turning back. Much of the census data you will work with in the next decade will be derived from the American Community Survey, and now is the time to start learning about it.

12:30-2:30 pm Lunch Break
2:30-3:30 pm

Building capacity for population and reproductive health research and training in African universities, with a Malawi case study
Dr. Amy Tsui, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Gates Institute collaborates with seven universities in six African countries to strengthen graduate education, research and practice in population and reproductive health. Operating as a network, this partnership has drawn on experience with NIH population research center support and translational research initiatives to update course curricula, build analytic skills and upgrade infrastructure in partner institutions. As an example, the presentation will describe the collaboration with the University of Malawi’s College of Medicine, which established a Center for Reproductive Health (CRH), and findings from a recent joint study testing the acceptability and feasibility of delivering HIV testing and family planning services to couples in their homes.

Session summary from the APLIC Blog
3:30-3:45 Coffee Break
3:45-5 pm

Tour: The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza

“The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza chronicles the assassination and legacy of President John F. Kennedy; interprets and supports the Dealey Plaza National Historical Landmark District and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza; and presents contemporary culture within the context of presidential history.” (from www.jfk.org)

Links

Population Association of America (PAA) 2010 Annual Meeting Program

PAA Annual Meeting Information

Conference Speaker Bios

Dr. Elana Broch is the assistant population research librarian at Princeton University. She earned a PhD in psychometric methods before earning her MLIS. She is the chair of the Public Policy section of the Social Science Division of the Special Libraries Association.

Allison Burns is a librarian with Family Health International (FHI) in Research Triangle Park, NC. Ms. Burns coordinates library services, tracks FHI publications and provides EndNote support. Prior to joining FHI, she was a statistician with RTI International. Ms. Burns received her MSLS and MPH degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she also received a BSPH in Biostatistics.

Trevor Croft is currently a Principal Demographic Expert with ICF Macro. He currently works principally on the Demographic and Health Surveys program, providing consulting and technical assistance support for the implementation and analysis of household surveys in developing countries. His 18 years with ICF Macro has been punctuated by a five year break in which he worked from 2003 to 2005 as Chief of Strategic Information at UNICEF headquarters in New York and then as Vice President of Blancroft Research International, LLC, a consulting services firm providing technical assistance related to statistics and monitoring in the international population and health area. He has 30 years experience in international survey data collection, processing, analysis and dissemination of results.

Dr. William Moen is the Director of Research in the College of Information, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Library and Information Sciences at the University of North Texas. He received his Ph.D. from Syracuse. He teaches courses on information organization, metadata, and networked information retrieval. Dr. Moen’s research and development projects explore the representation of information objects through various metadata schemas; the design and implementation of digital repositories to store the objects and their metadata; and flexible approaches for discovery, findability, and retrieval of digital information. He is currently Principal Investigator on an IMLS-funded grant with the Botanical Research Institute of Texas, which is developing a workflow model to transform and enhance printed herbarium specimen data into machine-processable form. He is just completing a two year project that developed a learning object repository for the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board.

Tara Murray is the Information Core Director for Penn State’s Population Research Institute, where she oversees PRI’s library, data archive, and information services. She holds an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to being a former president of APLIC, she is currently chair-elect of the SLA Social Science Division.

Dr. Amy Tsui is Director of the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health and a Professor in the Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She was director of the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from 1998-2002 and director of a USAID-funded global evaluation project from 1991-1998. Her research has focused on fertility, family planning, and population trends in the developing world. She is currently a member of the NIH Population Sciences Subcommitee.

Karina Velasco holds a Bachelor degree in Sociology with specialization in Latin American Studies from the University of Guadalajara in Mexico and a M.Sc. degree in Migration, Ethnic Relations and Multiculturalism from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. She worked for the MMP as an interviewer and research assistant from 2002 to 2006. In February 2010 she started working as the Fieldwork Coordinator for both the Mexican Migration Project and the Latin American Migration Project.

Katherine (Kay) Willson is currently a free-lance information advisor. After over 34 years at the Futures Group, serving as librarian and manager of knowledge services, she now works part-time for Futures Group and consults for other organizations on managing information resources. Her MLS and undergraduate degrees are from the State University of New York at Albany. Her subject specialties include international development (especially population policy), international health (especially HIV/AIDS and policy), and social marketing. In 1999 Kay presented at the APLIC conference on the POLICY Project’s “HIV/AIDS Policy Compendium” and in 2005 participated on a panel on “APLIC Librarians Respond to Change.” Throughout her professional career, Kay has been anticipating and identifying changing information needs of Futures Group staff and clients as the company itself underwent transition through various ownership changes. In recent years, she took over administration of the company’s SharePoint initiative, helping transform it from a file storage tool into a corporate intranet, the Futures Portal. Working remotely in Connecticut she has trained staff worldwide using online meetings and web conferencing. Kay is active in professional societies, having been a member of the SLA (Special Libraries Assn.) since 1975 and serving as Secretary, Membership Chair and President of the local Connecticut Valley Chapter at various times. She served as the Recording Secretary of APLIC-I (Assn. of Population and Family Planning Libraries and Information Centers, International) from 2001-2005, is a past-president, and is currently a director of APLIC in the Class of 2010.