Polar Infromation: An International Approach

Author(s): West, Sharon M.; McCarthy, Paul H. | Abstract: PolarPac - bibliography on Arctic and Antarctic information


Introduction
Organized research on the polar regions has taken place since Vitus Bering discovered Alaska in 1741.
Attempts to collate and disseminate the results of historical, scientific, ethnographic, and other research on northern regions have been underway almost as long. The same can be said of the Antarctic regions, whose recorded research is said to have begun in 1773 when James Cook crossed the Antarctic Circle. While most scientific literature is organized along disciplinary lines, information on the polar regions has always been an exception to this customary treatment. The interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary literature of the polar/cold regions is traditionally organized on a geographic basis (Thuronyi 1975).
In the 1970s there grew a heightened awareness that the Arctic and Antarctic Regions played a major role in world climate and that change to these environments might have wider implications for more populated areas (Gourdeau, Britten & Reed 1971). When individuals think of the North, many think of the Klondike Gold Rush, but the exploitation of the natural resources of the Arctic began in earnest with the oil discovery at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, and the subsequent building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1974. What is often forgotten is that a coalition of environmental and native American rights groups temporarily halted exploitation of the Prudhoe Bay oil while native land claims and environmental safeguards were put in place (Coates 1991). Concerns about global warming in the Arctic (Walsh 1991), the discovery of the ozone hole in the Antarctic (Farman, Gardiner & Shanklin 1985), and the understanding that polar environments must be protected for the good of world climate (Griffiths & Young 1990) have all contributed to an increasing awareness of the regions both in the scientific community and among the general public. This increased interest by conservationists, environmentalists, oil companies, and other interest groups has led to an explosion of polar information.

Problem Definition
The development of polar bibliography has been traced from the early twentieth century until the present by Andrews (1988). Perhaps the premier example of this historical commitment to informing scholars of northern research results was the Arctic Bibliography, prepared by the Arctic Institute of North America beginning in 1953. The Arctic Bibliography sought to be all-encompassing, but in 1975 it ceased publication, just as Arctic information and research began to proliferate.
After the demise of the Arctic Bibliography, it was necessary for numerous groups to provide control of their own parts of the literature to meet their arctic research requirements. This piecemeal approach led to uneven coverage. Primarily due to the military importance of the North, the scientific disciplines had better control of their literature while such areas as the social sciences and humanities were, and are, underrepresented in bibliographic control of northern information.
Polar researchers of all disciplines have long believed that they need more comprehensive access to information. The resolution of this problem has been made all the more difficult due to the interdisciplinary and international nature of Arctic and Antarctic research. By geographic definition, "Arctic" encompasses activities of the United States, Canada, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and other countries which historically have been involved in northern exploration efforts (Holden 1989).
Since the early 1970s there has been a high level of cooperation among polar librarians and, more lately, database producers, mainly through the biennial meetings of the international Polar Libraries Colloquy

PolarPac3
While containing literature of all disciplines, PolarPac3, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), was a deliberate attempt to increase the social science and humanities holdings of the database. Much of the literature of the northern social sciences is "gray" in nature and therefore relatively difficult to access. Insufficient attention had been given to those areas such as aboriginal rights and the power that knowledge and information can give to the native peoples of the North. Perhaps the best documented field is historical exploration, but even here much of the work is dependent upon original sources whose locations are unknown or known only to a few scholars.

Subject Content of PolarPac3
One of the advantages to having the PolarPac database resident on WLN is that it was easy and convenient to use the WLN Collection Assessment Service to analyze the subject content and strengths of PolarPac. The WLN Conspectus provides a framework to inventory library collections in twenty-four subject areas. These subject areas are further subdivided by approximately 500 subject categories.
The authors used the Collection Analysis feature to take an in-depth look at the database. The service provides a subject-oriented view of the collection by calculating totals and percentages within subject categories and descriptors. A combination of subject strength, publication date ranges, and languages can be analyzed for the database as a whole, while a detailed analysis can be done on groups of libraries within PolarPac as well. A similar study had been completed for PolarPac1 making a direct analysis of subject strengthening between the two editions possible.
One of the challenges in using the analysis program in an international database is that the program is

Future Directions
The authors are pursuing a strategy of increasing the breadth of database coverage by targeting specific geographically distributed libraries with discipline-based collections, rather than increasing the depth of the database by adding similar titles.