This document summarizes findings from preservation assessment surveys of 86 collections containing over 35,000 items from libraries and archives. The surveys found that storage, environmental control, and emergency planning were often inadequate. Improvements are needed in cataloguing backlogs, storage conditions, environmental monitoring and control, and staff training on emergency plans. The goal of preservation strategies is to maintain collections in good condition and usable for long-term access through proper storage, environmental management, and emergency preparedness.
How closely does Environmental, Health, and Safety (EH&S) monitor chemicals with the potential to form peroxides within the laboratories of your company? How well aware are your researchers of which chemicals these are and how to handle and dispose of them? Proper management of potential peroxide-forming solvents is vital to the safety of your researchers and facility staff, the compliance of your institution, the maintenance of your laboratory peroxide-forming chemical equipment and research materials, and the cost of your waste disposal. Take a look to find out everything you need to know about the hazards and handling of advanced peroxide forming chemicals.
Ruth Hull, Senior Scientist, Intrinsik Inc, Mississauga, Ontario, spoke at sustainability, chemical life cycle assessment and the work of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation's Chemicals Management Forum on May 16, 2012 in San Antonio, Texas. More information at: http://www.cec.org/chemicals2012
How closely does Environmental, Health, and Safety (EH&S) monitor chemicals with the potential to form peroxides within the laboratories of your company? How well aware are your researchers of which chemicals these are and how to handle and dispose of them? Proper management of potential peroxide-forming solvents is vital to the safety of your researchers and facility staff, the compliance of your institution, the maintenance of your laboratory peroxide-forming chemical equipment and research materials, and the cost of your waste disposal. Take a look to find out everything you need to know about the hazards and handling of advanced peroxide forming chemicals.
Ruth Hull, Senior Scientist, Intrinsik Inc, Mississauga, Ontario, spoke at sustainability, chemical life cycle assessment and the work of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation's Chemicals Management Forum on May 16, 2012 in San Antonio, Texas. More information at: http://www.cec.org/chemicals2012
Dr. Marty Matlock - Sustainability Research ReviewJohn Blue
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More presentations at http://trufflemedia.com/agmedia/conference/2016-global-roundtable-sustainable-beef
PANEL 4: Speeding up chemical assessments: from novel information to new management approaches, what works? - Brian Richards, Executive Director, Office of Chemical Safety, Australia
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About ISBER, the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repos...Andy Zaayenga
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PANEL 3: Priority setting of chemicals – potential for harmonisation and synergies
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The real-world observational study experts of Covance Market Access Services draw upon decades of industry and academic experience using real-world data to develop and synthesize evidence to support your product's value story.
Dr. Marty Matlock - Sustainability Research ReviewJohn Blue
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PANEL 4: Speeding up chemical assessments: from novel information to new management approaches, what works? - Brian Richards, Executive Director, Office of Chemical Safety, Australia
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About ISBER, the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repos...Andy Zaayenga
The International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER) is the largest international forum that addresses the technical, legal, ethical, and managerial issues relevant to repositories of biological and environmental specimens. ISBER is a professional society of individuals and organizations who share an interest in promoting consistent, high quality standards, ethical principles and innovation in biospecimen banking by uniting the global biobanking community. ISBER invites all sub-components of government, academia, the private sector, and manufacturers to become active participants of the society.
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Influence and Impact: Designing What Works – increase your ability to contribute to your organization with more influence and impact, focusing on five key leadership roles (learner, relationship–builder, visionary, coach, and globalist) and learning two skills that move people (attunement and reframing).
Lightning Talk #9: How UX and Data Storytelling Can Shape Policy by Mika Aldabaux singapore
How can we take UX and Data Storytelling out of the tech context and use them to change the way government behaves?
Showcasing the truth is the highest goal of data storytelling. Because the design of a chart can affect the interpretation of data in a major way, one must wield visual tools with care and deliberation. Using quantitative facts to evoke an emotional response is best achieved with the combination of UX and data storytelling.
Succession “Losers”: What Happens to Executives Passed Over for the CEO Job?
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Overview:
Shareholders pay considerable attention to the choice of executive selected as the new CEO whenever a change in leadership takes place. However, without an inside look at the leading candidates to assume the CEO role, it is difficult for shareholders to tell whether the board has made the correct choice. In this Closer Look, we examine CEO succession events among the largest 100 companies over a ten-year period to determine what happens to the executives who were not selected (i.e., the “succession losers”) and how they perform relative to those who were selected (the “succession winners”).
We ask:
• Are the executives selected for the CEO role really better than those passed over?
• What are the implications for understanding the labor market for executive talent?
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• Are boards better at identifying CEO talent than other research generally suggests?
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Roundtable of aflatoxin experts on
“Building a multi-stakeholder approach to mitigate aflatoxin contamination of food and feed”
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Despite having a full team in place, do you feel you are still not in control of your hazardous waste programs? Do you fall short on meeting department goals? There are several key elements to managing a high-level and elite program with less added cost than you might assume. Reducing cost, improving compliance and sustainability, while maximizing safety are some of the key components to include in all programs.
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Towards a scalable framework for evaluating and prioritizing climate‐smart agriculture practices and programs
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One out of every four food calories intended for people is not ultimately consumed. The Protocol seeks to address the challenges of measuring food loss and waste. Find out more at http://www.wri.org/our-work/project/global-food-loss-and-waste-measurement-protocol
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CCRP9 'Ireland adapts to Climate Change' and CCRP10 'Integrating Climate Change Adaptation into Sectoral Policies in Ireland'
It is impossible to deny the role of stock assessments and simulations of harvest control rules in the increase of sustainable fisheries in the North Atlantic. Across the spectrum from data rich to data limited, new methods are being applied that further improve the evidence base for management. However, all fisheries are obliged to operate under the ecosystem approach (EA) and the narrative exists that traditional fisheries science does not equate with EA. Ecosystem-based fisheries management (EBFM) requires an assessment of risk, and the trade-off between management objectives. Higher risk, requires stronger evidence. This talk will highlight how fisheries science, whether implicitly or explicitly, is contributing to EBFM and that in the highly fished North Atlantic, EBFM cannot be executed without strong stock assessments, forecasts and MSEs. It will also lay out some challenges ahead for fisheries science as fisheries management needs to deliver to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Green Supply Chain Management is the coordination of natural speculation into SCM. Management of Green Supply Chains is critical in affecting the aggregate environment effect of any associations required in supply chain management exercises. All the more essentially, Management of Green Supply Chain can add to maintainability execution improvement.
The fifth webinar continues the momentum of the series as it focuses on providing concrete approaches for identifying barriers and enablers, emphasising behaviour change approaches.
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Proceedings available at: http://www.extension.org/67679
The Cornell University PRO-DAIRY Anaerobic Digester Workforce Development Project is a project funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, aimed at developing and delivering high quality educational programs targeted to a range of workforces within the dairy farm-based anaerobic digestion (AD) sector of the clean energy field. One of the barriers to growth of the AD industry in New York State, as identified by current AD operators, is the lack of a trained, skilled workforce to service and maintain different aspects related to the AD and biogas systems. These courses are aimed at developing a workforce to support this need, and to eliminate this barrier to growth.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
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• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
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1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
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Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
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Watch this recorded webinar about real-time monitoring of application performance. See how to integrate Apache JMeter, the open-source leader in performance testing, with InfluxDB, the open-source time-series database, and Grafana, the open-source analytics and visualization application.
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Length: 30 minutes
Session Overview
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During this webinar, we will cover the following topics while demonstrating the integrations of JMeter, InfluxDB and Grafana:
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The modern software delivery process (or the CI/CD process) includes many tools, distributed teams, open-source code, and cloud platforms. Constant focus on speed to release software to market, along with the traditional slow and manual security checks has caused gaps in continuous security as an important piece in the software supply chain. Today organizations feel more susceptible to external and internal cyber threats due to the vast attack surface in their applications supply chain and the lack of end-to-end governance and risk management.
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Gopinath Rebala
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https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
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Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
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And...
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A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
2. 2
Knowing the Need
State of preservation, 2006-2011
86 Preservation Assessment Surveys
30 library collections; 56 archive
collections
35,216 items surveyed
Representative of circa 50 million
items
www.bl.uk/blpac/ktn.html
3. 3
Preservation Assessment Survey
Tool to generate an overview of preservation needs, running since
2000
www.bl.uk/blpac/paslib.html
Assesses: access & use, significance, preservation measures,
condition & usability, and damage
Key attributes:
Standard tool
Generates comparable results
Results can be aggregated
Individual benchmarking against aggregated results
Trends can be identified
Results can be used for collective advocacy
4. 4
Knowing the Need – key findings
Preservation measures
0%
20%
40%
60%
80%
100%
Inadequate 17 41 62 17 13 38
Adequate 83 59 38 83 87 62
Handling Storage Environment Security
Fire
protection
Emergency
control
5. 5
2006…to…2012
0
20
40
60
80
100
2006 2012 2006 2012 2006 2012 2006 2012 2006 2012 2006 2012
Storage Environment Security Fire protection Emergency
control
Handling
Inadequate practice
Adequate practice
6. 6
Summary of needs
There are cataloguing backlogs to be addressed and there is a need for greater
online access to catalogues
Improvements in collection storage are required
Absence of regular housekeeping / cleaning programmes
Challenges in storing over-sized material
Improvements in environmental management are required
Environmental monitoring is now more widespread, but controlling the
environment to recognised guidelines is difficult to achieve (historically
BS5454)
Improvements in emergency control planning are required
Emergency plans are more widespread, but frequently staff are not trained
in their implementation compromising the effectiveness of the plan
10. 10
Optimising preservation
Goal of preservation is long-term use and re-use of collections
Know your collections
Understand the materials, their vulnerability and their tolerances
Understand demand levels, current and future
Understand the existing condition & usability of collections
11. 11
Weaknesses in preservation practice in the areas of
storage, environmental practice and emergency
control planning should be addressed
Maintain routine preservation housekeeping activity.
Improve environmental management strategies and their
application. Target improvements and aim for greater energy
efficiency.
Review emergency control plans regularly and provide training
and support for staff involved in their implementation.
12. 12
Thank you…
Caroline Peach
British Library Preservation Advisory Centre
caroline.peach@bl.uk
www.bl.uk/blpac
Editor's Notes
At the Preservation Advisory Centre, our work focuses on providing support and services that ensure continuity of access to library and archive collections. We define preservation very broadly – all the activities which go towards ensuring long-term access to collections and content.
We have recently published our own report, Knowing the Need which is available online at this link, www.bl.uk/blpac/ktn.html Over the next 10 minutes I’m going to highlight the key findings of Knowing the Need and how they relate to the issues raised in the Archives at Risk report. Knowing the Need is an aggregation of information on the preservation needs of physical library and archive collections. This report represents the second aggregation of data, covering the period 2006-2011. (The first was published in 2006, including data between 2000 and 2005.) The information on preservation needs is collected using the Preservation Assessment Survey, a tool which was developed in the late 1990s initially as a result of a British Library research grant and subsequently by the National Preservation Office (our predecessor body) with input from TNA (PRO)
At that time there was an ambition to create a national preservation strategy, and a tool for collecting evidence of preservation need was seen as an essential component of that work. Important attributes of the Preservation Assessment Survey which underpin this work are: It provides a common methodology for the collection of information about preservation needs. Because information is collected in the same way, it can be compared. Because information is collected in the same way, it can be aggregated. Individual organisations can used the aggregated results to ‘benchmark’ their own situation against wider practice. Through aggregation, trends in needs (or common needs) can be identified. The results can be used for collective advocacy.
As a result of the Knowing the Need project we have a wealth of information about how library and archive collections are used, valued and what condition they are in, but for today’s purposes I’m focusing on what we found in terms of the preservation measures in place. In this graph you can see that there are strengths in handling, security and fire protection; but weaknesses in storage, environmental management and emergency control planning. This resonates strongly with the findings of the Archives at Risk report.
Although the two sets of data are not strictly comparable, it is interesting to look at how the Knowing the Need results for 2006 compare with the more recent findings. In all areas of preservation practice, the collective results from 2012 show better practice than the collective results from 2006. But you can see that the three areas I identified as weak in the previous slide, were also the three areas of common weakness in 2006. So what does this mean in terms of preservation strategy? Why are these issues consistently difficult to address? Do we not have the right tools or knowledge to address them, or are we not using the right tools/knowledge in the right way? We probed the results in more detail to find out what exactly was proving consistently challenging in the three areas of common weakness.
We found that housekeeping and cleaning was a challenge, as was finding adequate storage for over-sized material (particularly for archives) We found that while environmental monitoring had improved, it was still proving difficult for organisations to meet the parameters set out in BS5454 (this data of course having been collected prior to the introduction of PD5454). And we found that, although emergency plans are now more commonly in place, the staff responsible for using them are often not trained on their implementation – so in effect, a paper exercise only. I do agree with the Archives at Risk report that gaps in skills and knowledge are part of this problem. And indeed we have used our findings from Knowing the Need to establish the programme of 20 or so workshops that we now run through the year; it is also behind the topics covered in our series of free guidance booklets. I think gaps in skills and knowledge is a particular issue at the moment because of the rate of staff turnover – capacity becomes an issue not only in numbers of staff, but also in terms of knowledge and institutional knowledge, and then there is also the other major resource, money.
In the context of the Knowing the Need report this diminished capacity led me to question how we could achieve reasonable standards of preservation practice with increasingly limited resources – hence the subtitle of the report ‘optimising preservation for library and archive collections’. You can read the detail online, but fundamentally (and I’m being a pragmatist not defeatist here) I believe that we don’t have the luxury to apply preservation ‘best practice’ across the board. Furthermore, at the risk of being more controversial, I don’t think we need to do the same things across the board. What we do need to do is think about how we can achieve maximum impact from the things that we are able to do and make sure we have the right evidence available to prioritise actions and support cost-effective decisions. For instance – we could use the condition & usability of collections as a basis for prioritisation. These two graphs…
… and these two, show that there is little difference in storage, environmental practice, boxing or handling in relation to the physical condition of items.
To take things a step further, this graph shows demand in relation to the condition/usability of items. At the outset I mentioned that these survey results represent an estimated total collection in excess of 50 million items – that’s a massive number. But if we choose condition/usability (i.e. how vulnerable an item is to continued use) as the criterion for prioritising action, and we know that 2% of items in an ‘unusable’ condition, and of that 2%, 4% are in high demand – the number of items to prioritise for action becomes around 40,000. Still a big number, admittedly – but much smaller, and theoretically more manageable, than 50 million.
To be able to target resources in this way, and to apply our preservation strategies and knowledge in the most effective way, we do need to know the collections. For this reason I am extremely interested in the findings of the BRA report. I think the timing is excellent with respect to the work that the archive sector has been doing on the co-creation of the archive accreditation standard. And I would certainly agree that collaboration between organisations is an effective way of maximising resources to address common issues.
The areas that I am particularly interested in, in terms of the preservation of physical collections, are these. I think that we can work together so that in five years time we can see considerable improvements in all these areas. What are we doing at the Preservation Advisory Centre? Some of the immediate, and practical, support we have in place includes: Our training programme (we have a session on dust & dirt on 11 th June, salvage on 18 th June, and environment on 4 th July). We’re looking at the feasibility of creating a free webinar on emergency planning. And of course we are very open to working with others, particularly on advocacy issues – indeed working with BRA to put on this event is an example of that.