Conference Schedule

The Life and Literature Conference will take place in the SIMPSON THEATRE at The Field Museum. Day two activities will include breakout sessions in other rooms. See schedule for locations of these sessions.

Download the schedule here.

Panel Descriptions

Research, Informatics, and the Published Record.

This track will bring together zoologist, botanists, and bioinformaticians to address the future of biodiversity literature and its relationship to scientific research. What methods of digitizing and delivery will promote research and what methods will impede it?

Publishers, Aggregators, and Authors - New Models and Access.

This track will bring together publishers, aggregators and editors/authors in the digital and print biodiversity publishing communities. The session will address current and future publishing models including economics, sustainability models, electronic archives and impact on the biodiversity community. Goals for the outcomes of the conference and this track include outlining plans for a better understanding between authors, publishers, and libraries. What are the resources that institutions use currently to support authors, publishing and libraries? How are the long standing relationships among libraries, publishers and authors evolving? What changes have occurred with an Open Access environment? How does author retention of copyright or using Creative Commons rights affect libraries, publishers and authors? Further, the track will discuss innovative technologies of publishing, disseminating, indexing and aggregating biodiversity information with a special focus on automated tools and XML-based editorial and dissemination workflows.

Learning and Education.

The digital resources of BHL have numerous uses for education and learning and should increase as better tools and services are provided to search and access content. The potential audiences include citizen scientists, students from K-12 and university, educators, informal science education centers, exhibit designers and the interested public.

Questions to be addressed in the Education and Learning track include: What do different audiences want from digitized literature resources? How can we make the digital resources in BHL accessible and useful to different learning groups? What are the tools that provide added value to the resources in the BHL? (species interaction tool, tree of life tool -- should we be more specific about these?) Can we leverage these audiences to provide crowd-sourcing tasks such as identification of images, species descriptions, historical range and distribution information? How can we incorporate BHL resources into electronic textbooks combined with content from EOL?

Building Collaborative Networks for Science and the Humanities through Scientific Literature.

This track will bring together members of the humanities, bioinformatics, information science, and taxonomic communities, to explore and build collaborations around tools, data, and user communities. Sessions will address such topics as digital library systems and services, application protocol interfaces (APIs) for data mining and analysis, scientific illustration as art, blurring community boundaries for collaboration, and more. Goals for the outcomes of the conference and this track include building new collaboration communities, outlining plans for cross- and inter-disciplinary funding, and greater understanding of resources and content by all participants.