XII Seminar of Environmental Documentation Centers and Protected Natural Areas

  • Names

    Naturgune Babestu Eta Ingurumeneko Dokumentazio-Zentroen XII Minitegia
    XII Seminario de Centros de Documentación Ambiental e Espazos Naturais Protexidos
    XII Seminari de Centres de Documentació Ambiental i d´Espais Naturals Protegits

  • Place and dates

    CENEAM, Valsaín (Segovia), from 17th to 19th June 2013

  • Coordination

    Rosario Toril. Documentary Center from CENEAM.

    Montserrat Grabolosa. Natural park Zona Volcánica de Garrotxa. Generalitat of Catalonia.

    Pilar González Meyaui. UN Office in Support of the International Decade for Action “Water for Life”, 2005-2015.

  • Introduction and participants

    The XII edition of Seminar of Environmental Documentation Centers and Protected Natural Areas met together 45 professionals from 15 Autonomous Communities (see lista de asistentes) that develop their activity in documentary centers and the depository libraries from UN in Spain. Traditionally is CENEAM, which belongs to Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Environment, the manager of organizing the seminar, with the collaboration of Documentary Center from Natural park Zona Volcánica de Garrotxa, Generalitat of Catalonia. In this ocassion, UN Office in Support of the International Decade for Action “Water for Life”, 2005-2015 has also joined to organize this seminar.

    In the area of water and its drainage, they explained interesting experiences, as well as various workshops related to document management and marketing on the Internet. As a new feature, this year they have made a collective document with a selection of information sources used by the assistants and a documentary workshop, in which they solved and discussed different issues of the participant´s daily work.

    Listado de participantes en el XII Seminario de Centros de Documentación Ambiental y Espacios Naturales Protegidos

  • Seminar development

    Monday 17th June 2013  

    After the welcome to the seminar by Mr. Juan Carlos Dueñas, Director of CENEAM, made a brief presentación de RECIDA, to inform the new participants, since this year many new centers have joined the organization, in collaboration with the UN.

    The first day was dedicated to the Dialog “Improving access to knowledge and information on water and sanitation in the UN system”. This activity is part of the water dialogs organized by Decenio Internacional para la Acción “El agua, fuente de vida” 2005-2015 . It served to learn about different practices and management initiatives on water and drainage knowledge within and outside the United Nations system. And within the framework of the same, they organized several workshops: 

    At the end of such an intense day, Nuria Sacristán (UNED) guided us through a beautiful geological itinerary through Segovia, where we enjoyed the breathtaking views from the city.

    Tuesday, 18th June 2013

    We begin Tuesday with a sharing of about 60 fuentes de información ambiental that the attendees had previously sent to the seminar and that they use in their daily work. Montse Grabolosa and Rosario Toril coordinated it.

    Then, we carried out the following activities:

    • Dialnet plus: la nueva herramienta de Dialnet. Rubén Herce, from Fundación Dialnet (Dialnet Foundation), explained to us exhaustively all the utilities of Dialnet plus and how we can take advantage of it in our daily work.
    • Document management workshop. In this workshop, we discussed several aspects that the managers of each center raised for their resolution (Image management, strategic vigilance, micro sponsorship, competitive intelligence, etc.). The Accessory Commission were the ones who attended the workshop this year present: Isidro Aguillo (CCHS –CSIC), José Pino (Sierra Nevada National Park), and Elena Primo (Carlos III Health Institute). And in some cases also the participants attended themself.
    • Ranking Web de los Centros RECIDA: they gave us methods, results, and proposals to improve our website's appearance and position. Isidro Aguillo showed the issues that had had to make the ranking and how to improve our websites.
    • Gestores de referencias: Zotero. Elena Morato (AEMET, which means State Methodology Agency) first made an introduction about reference managers, why their use is necessary, to which potential users it addressed and which are the reference managers in the market today, and the differences between the three main ones (EndNote, Mendeley, and Zotero), to be able to choose the most suitable for our necessities. Then, he explained the reference manager “Zotero”, for being the most simple and easy to understand.
       

    The objective of this workshop was that the assistants of the Seminar could manage and save a large number of documents, organize their bibliographic references in a simple way (articles, books, pdf, videos, images, websites, etc.), share their bibliographies with other people with common interests or train library managers in the use of these tools.

    In the afternoon, it had two kinds of meetings: on the one hand, the depository libraries of the United Nations, and on the other hand, the working groups of RECIDA. 

    • The working meeting of the depository libraries of the United Nations in Spain brought together four of the five existing libraries. Oficina del Decenio “El agua, Fuente de Vida” (Water for Life Decade Office), and there they discussed the current situation of the libraries in the region, their weaknesses, and strengths. Moreover, they also discussed the different states characterized by the significant presence of new information and communication technologies. As a result, they have prepared a report, and it will send to headquarters in New York.
    • RECIDA working groups. The working groups met: Experiences, publications, social networks, marketing and small libraries. At the end, each working group drafted their proposals for the next seminar, which they presented on Wednesday.
       

    To end the day, Antonio Moreno from CENEAM guided the participants on a trail through the forest of Valsaín and Eresma River, which was very rewarding, given the long day's work.

    At the dinner, they tasted autonomic products and exchanged books. Alejandro del Moral acted as master of ceremonies in the absence of Josep Melero. He also read us the poem “Arte Poética” by Borges, so appropriate for the topic of this year and how it approaches what this network is all about.

    Wednesday, 19th June 2013

    At first light, we presented some topics which had been pending from the documentary workshop. And also some explanations of the reference managers, requested by the participants.

    Afterwards, the 2012 report was discussed, in which they made a review of the degree of fulfillment of the commitment acquired in the previous seminar. In general, and given that this year´s seminar was held very early, several matters were left pending for the next year.

    José Pino will become a member of Comisión Asesora de RECIDA (RECIDA Advisory Committee), together with Isidro Aguillo, Elena Primo and Jesús Tramullas.

    The proposals for the next year were:

    General aspects

    • Make the Policies of photographs, operation of the portal and distribution list, etc.
    • Find grants and subsidies
    • Create documentary center networks and entities with document and environmental information in the Autonomous Communities: Possible pilot test of coordination among the Catalan centers
    • Continue prospecting for new centers and universities of interest to collaborate with RECIDA
    • Collaborate in a combination bibliography, a sample of publications, etc. for the IV Congreso Nacional de Desarrollo Rural. Campo y ciudad: un futuro común (Zaragoza 12nd, 13rd and 14th February 2014) (IV National Congress of Rural Development. Country and City: a common future)
    • Environment and Agriculture Congress, which will celebrate in Zaragoza the next year
    • Prepare a workshop on intellectual property, copyright, exploitation rights, etc. to solve doubts of the centers (Monserrat Tafalla from the University of Barcelona)
    • Continue to complete the list of sources about environmental information made in this seminar and post it on the CENEAM, on the RECIDA portal, and on Delicious.
    • Search for photo management, requested in the document management workshop (Rosario Toril).
    • Continue collaborating with the United Nations group
    • RECIDA portal:
      ○ Create the structure of the center files and open spaces for working groups. Possibility of a search engine in the publications section (Jesús Tramullas)
      ○ Include basic documents to disseminate RECIDA
      ○ Upload a file of resources to share
      ○ Expand the list of electronic resources
      ○ Disseminate the network in the activities of the centers


    Working groups:

    Experiences

    • Improve the RECIDA centers' outstanding experiences file: Review and add more fields related to social networks and user profiles.
    • Fill out new experience sheets. Then select the most interesting experiences for the group and disseminate them through social networks.


    Publications

    • To review the new structure of this section in the portal and complete it with the contributions of the RECIDA centers


    Pequeñas bibliotecas

    • Seek support from the MAGRAMA and consider the possibility of joint cataloging with a library in the same Autonomous Community.


    Marketing

    • Review the objectives and strategic lines of the communication plan.
    • Expand the search for networks with communication plans and extract results.
    • Expand the data fields we collect from the RECIDA centers file ㅡbackground, services, subjects…ㅡand also target audiences and links to social networks. Extract and disseminate statistical data.
    • Incorporate a list of environmental events in the portal and links to Google Maps.


    Social Network

    • Analyze RECIDA's Facebook page.
    • Create a procedure manual to elaborate a video for each RECIDA center. Once the centers have made the 30 seconds videos, it would be posted on Youtube and also consider the opportunity to create a RECIDA group in this medium.


    Finally, and before the evaluation, Lola Burgos from the Generalitat de Catalunya gave a workshop about Cómo hacer una web sin (apenas) conocimientos of Web editing and with a zero budget using the Webnode program http://www.webnode.cat/, which is the one used at her Center to create the virtual showcases, and which was of great interest to the attendees.

    After the positive balance of this edition, which has incorporated an atractive group of professionals from United Nations documentation centers, it is considered convenient to continue the line of exchanges with environmental groups, and it is proposed environmental journalists could be the guest group next year.

    We will study the best date for the next seminar, which, in principle, will be held at CENEAM in Valsaín, if there are no proposals from any center.

    If you want to see the event´s photos, you can click on the following link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/recida/sets/

    Participatory distribution list: http://www.rediris.es/list/info/recida.html

Accesos Directos