Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Categories
Fall CAMMP Bulletin
Tag: v53i4
Categories
Chair’s Message: Fall 2026
Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Brian Quigley
Ah fall! My favorite time of year. Students return to campus, leaves change vibrant colors, an autumnal chill stalks the air – and you can pull out your favorite flannel shirts and enjoy a pumpkin spice latte!
True to the season of harvest and transitions, our community is reaping the rewards of the Transition Team’s hard work on merging the former PAM and Chemistry communities. Our petition to become the CAMMP SIG has been submitted and is currently being evaluated by ASIS&T leadership. For more information, check out the Transition Team Update from Judith Currano elsewhere in this issue.
As we look to the future, let’s also briefly look back and celebrate this past summer. We had an active slate of programming, including the PAM Awards ceremony. We also hosted three thriving virtual roundtables tackling some of our field’s most pressing topics: from AI literacy and faculty engagement to international collaboration, grant funding, and the launch of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). The roundtable recaps in this issue provide more details.
In the coming weeks:
- Keep an eye out for your CAMMP SIG officer election ballot
- Watch for updates on our CAMMP SIG petition
- Save the date for our virtual Business Meeting this November (held within two weeks of the ASIS&T Annual Meeting – invitation to be sent soon)
Wishing you all a wonderful fall and hope to connect with you soon!
Brian Quigley
PAM Chair 2026
Categories
Transition Team Update
Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Judith Currano
Since our report in the last Bulletin, the transition team has been extremely busy. The expanded team consists of the following members of the former SLA PAM and Chemistry Communities:
- Ted Baldwin
- Kayleigh Bohémier
- Denise Callihan
- Judith Currano
- Nicholas Dehler
- Jerrel Horn
- Nastasha Johnson
- John Kromer
- Brian Quigley
- Henrik Spoon
We have met four times since July, with the goal of filing a petition to form a new ASIS&T Special Interest Group (SIG) using a temporary, expedited process developed for those SLA communities that could not easily be absorbed into an existing ASIS&T unit. This petition required a list of officers, funding opportunities, and proposed activities for the coming year, meaning that the transition team needed to devise a preliminary organizational structure for the unit and recruit leaders for its inaugural year. This report details our progress on these tasks.
On September 16, 2026, Brian Quigley submitted a petition to form the Chemistry, Astronomy, Mathematics, Materials & Physics Special Interest Group (CAMMP SIG), with the following mission statement:
The CAMMP SIG fosters a vibrant community of practice for librarians and information professionals supporting chemistry, astronomy, mathematics, materials science, physics, and related fields. The production, organization, and retrieval of information in these disciplines differ from those in other subjects and present information professionals with unique challenges. CAMMP creates a professional space for these researchers and practitioners that advances excellence in discipline-based librarianship by connecting research with professional practice; exploring emerging developments in science, scholarly communication, and information services; providing an infrastructure to support peer networking, mentoring, and knowledge sharing; fostering continuing education and professional development; and cultivating strong relationships with publishers and technology partners.
To enact this mission, CAMMP will be led by an executive committee consisting of four elected officers and three appointed officers. The transition team recruited the following individuals to serve as CAMMP officers for the 2026-2027 year, pending approval of our petition by the ASIS&T Board:
- Chair-Elect (elected): Emma Moore
- Chair (elected): Brian Quigley1
- Past-Chair (elected): vacant (Judith Currano2 will fill these duties if required)
- Secretary/Treasurer (elected): Henrik Spoon3
- Communications Officer (appointed): Mary Schlembach
- Membership Officer (appointed): Jenny Hart
- Programming Officer (appointed): Nastasha Johnson
Once established, CAMMP will hold annual elections for the positions of a chair-elect, who will commit to a three-year progression through the chair’s succession, and secretary/treasurer, who will commit to a one-year term. The other three officers will be appointed by the chair, with terms yet to be determined.
The business of CAMMP will largely be conducted by four standing committees. The Communications Committee, chaired by the Communications Officer, will be responsible for the newsletter, the Web site, iConnect posts, and maintaining e-mail lists. The Membership Committee, chaired by the Membership Officer, will undertake the tasks of encouraging membership renewals, recruiting new members, running a mentoring program, and coordinating hospitality events at ASIS&T and other conferences. The Programming Committee, chaired by the Programming Officer, will plan Webinars, roundtables, continuing education sessions and courses, and regional meetings. (Annual conference planning will be the responsibility of the CAMMP Chair.) Finally, the Finance Committee, chaired by the Secretary/Treasurer, will assume responsibility for fundraising, budgeting, audit, and other financial duties.
Outside of the standing committee structure, an ad-hoc nominating committee will convene each year to develop the annual election slate. The transition team also recognized that awards and travel scholarships historically have been very important to both the SLA PAM and Chemistry Communities but has decided to postpone the establishment of an awards committee. Once the new CAMMP executive committee takes office, they will set procedures governing awards.
As we await the response to our petition by ASIS&T, the transition team will continue to meet and discuss CAMMP’s organizational and operational structure so that, if our petition is approved, the volunteer leaders can begin their work immediately. Lance Utley, Henrik Spoon, and Nicholas Dehler have agreed to form an ad-hoc committee to investigate existing ASIS&T unit archive practices and to recommend a sustainable model for CAMMP archives. We will also continue to discuss the CAMMP newsletter and to develop a system that encourages and coordinates micro-volunteer opportunities for all CAMMP members. Please stay tuned for more information on the CAMMP iConnect discussion group.
Judith Currano
Chemistry Chair 2026
Categories
Summer Astronomy Roundtable
Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Henrik Spoon
For this Summer’s Astronomy Roundtable on July 8, we invited Dr. Clare Higgs of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile to tell us about the extraordinary capabilities and mission of this ground based optical light observatory. We learned that, after a year of testing, the observatory had just started on its 10-year mission to scan the entire night sky every few days to create a time-lapse record of our Universe.
One single image, obtained with the largest digital camera ever built, might show 200 exploding stars (supernovae), 7200 variable stars changing brightness over time, 70 hungry supermassive blackholes, 400 asteroids, comets and other solar system objects, and other neat stuff that we don’t yet know about. Ten years from now, each part of the sky will have been imaged over 800 times, revealing changes across all time scales.
The amount of data generated will hover around 10 terabytes per night, requiring a good, stable internet connection to the servers at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California. After ten years the processed data will comprise 500 petabytes.
Near-real-time processed data will be released within minutes to days, alerting scientists of detected sky changes. This may result in up to 7 million alerts per night, speeding up the discovery of exploding massive stars (supernovae) and asteroids on collision course with Earth, allowing for timely follow-up observations.
Categories
Summer Physics Roundtable
Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Emma Moore
This year’s PAM virtual Physics roundtable was titled Physics in An Age of Hardening Borders, looking outward rather than inward from the discipline. Emma Moore of the Institute for Advanced Study and Eliot Boden of Washington University (St. Louis) moderated. Across an hour of free ranging discussion on Zoom, librarians supporting physics teaching and research at multiple different levels, institutions, and funding levels took stock of how the past few years and past couple of decades have changed the support work they do. They were joined also by PAM industry partners who spoke about how this has affected the atmosphere of scientific publishing. The first topic was collaboration, and many attendees reflected about the varying affects that immigration law changes and enforcement have had, particularly in regards to training of undegraduate and graduate students. That segued into a larger discussion of how enrollment relates to funding and teaching. This was discussed around both broad themes, relating to how institutional stability affects hiring and retention choices; as well as more granular respects such as relationship building. The latter comes into play even given recent transformations of PAM librarian roles. While there may be fewer explicit liaison librarian positions, the function remains an important mental paradigm. While the discussion was frank and thus optimism could be in short supply, the sense of community among the attendees and PAM at large was palpable.
Categories
Solar Eclipse 2026
Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Ruth Kneale
So…. an attempt was made to see the 2026 total solar eclipse. Let me tell you about it!
On August 12, 2026, there was a total solar eclipse that fell across the northern part of Spain and the western part of Iceland. My family and I had always wanted to see Iceland, and this was a great excuse to go, so off we went! (We went ahead of time to explore Reykjavik and parts of the country, and if you ever have the opportunity, I highly recommend it.)
Reykjavik was expected to experience just under a minute of totality; the longest experience in the country was at Látrabjarg in the Westfjords, for 2 minutes 13 seconds. If you’ve looked at a map of Iceland you’ll see that the Westfjords are one of the most remote regions of the country. Between Reykjavik and the Westfords is the Snæfellsnes peninsula, considered “the place to be” for the Iceland Eclipse Festival, which was held August 11-15.
However, there were many concerns in Iceland, covered in online visitor articles, reddit posts, and Icelandic news; I read about them in The Reykjavik Grapevine, an alternative magazine and Iceland’s largest English-language publication. (You have to see their front page and read about the art… see below!) The biggest concern was the impact of the gigantic increase of traffic on roads, because the main road leading to the eclipse zones not only is just a two-lane road, it goes through a tunnel. It would have been awful to have been trying to chase the eclipse and instead get stuck in an hours-long traffic jam! There were also significant impacts to food and lodging. Hotels sold out ages ago, and the few rooms still available were going for more than $1000USD a night. People were renting spaces in fields to camp in – the gentleman in front of us at Customs at the airport was one of them. He’d tried finding a place to stay six months out, but there was nothing available!
Authorities and science communicators were telling the 80,000-plus eclipse visitors “if you can stay home [or at your hotel], stay home. It can be best just to experience the eclipse at home rather than trying to go somewhere,” said G. Pétur Matthíasson, spokesperson for the Icelandic Road and Coastal Administration. We were lucky enough to have a hotel room on the 6th floor with a balcony, and that’s where we planned to watch the eclipse. Although we’d gone prepared, the National Library of Iceland was handing out eclipse glasses, so we snagged some of those, too. Of course, as happens with an eclipse, there’s always the chance the weather will interfere. The day of was grey and drizzly – but we weren’t giving up hope, because the weather can always change! But….despite that hope, it stayed overcast and raining.
Let me tell you, though. The power and weirdness and just sheer awesomeness still came through. When totality started, at 5:47pm, the skies abruptly got darker than they had been the entire rest of our visit. The seagulls all settled down. I swear, the wind died down, too. And the world just got quiet, except for the pattering of the raindrops. And a minute later – technically, 58 seconds – the clouds brightened back up to their stormy grey, the birds went “what?”, and it was hard to tell that anything had happened.
Even though we didn’t get to see what we’d gone for (or the Northern Lights, for that matter, we were just too early for them), our Eclipse 2026 trip was totally worth it. And I have to say again, if you have a chance to visit Iceland, go for it!
Categories
Eclipse Gallery
Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Zac Painter was in Bruges during the eclipse and managed to catch these images; check out those natural pinholes!
These images were obtained via Reddit’s r/solareclipse and r/astronomy subreddits, and shared here with permission of the posters:
https://www.reddit.com/r/solareclipse/comments/1vumd7m/eclipse_in_spain/
https://www.reddit.com/r/solareclipse/comments/1vz14nh/the_corona_of_the_2026_total_solar_eclipse_as/ ; also links to his academic pages with many more images
https://www.reddit.com/r/solareclipse/comments/1w55gon/12th_august_total_eclipse_spain/
Categories
Fun Stuff: Publications
Volume 53, Issue 4 – Fall 2026
The shortest published physics paper on record is a 1951 Physical Review note by Friedrich Lenz titled “The Ratio of Proton and Electron Mass,” which contains just 27 words, one equation, one number, and a single reference.
The shortest mathematics research paper ever published is titled “Can (n2 + 1) unit equilateral triangles cover an equilateral triangle of side (>n), say (n + ε)?” Written by John Conway and Alexander Soifer from the mathematics department of Princeton University, it was published in The American Mathematical Monthly in 2005. It consists of two words (“n² + 2 can”) accompanied by two geometric figures.
The best co-authored publication (IMHO) is “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc ³He”, written by J. H. Hetherington and F. D. C. Willard, which was accepted by Physical Review Letters and published in number 35 (November 1975). F. D. C. Willard was the author’s Siamese cat.
The publication with the highest number of co-authors is “A global study assessing the safety of elective surgery during the COVID-19 pandemic and prioritizing patients for vaccination,” with 15,025 authors, published in the British Journal of Surgery in 2021.
The paper with the shortest abstract is undoubtedly “Is the Sequence of Earthquakes in Southern California, with Aftershocks Removed, Poissonian?” by J. K. Gardner and L. Knopoff, published in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America Vol 64 No. 5, 1974. The abstract just says “Yes.”
Categories
Fill Your Calendar
Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Curious about upcoming events? Have a look!
IAU’s Working Group on the Preservation and Digitization of Photographic Plates (WG-PDPP), virtual meeting, October 20-23, 2026
ASIS&T 2026 Annual Meeting in Bangkok, Thailand. November 6-10, 2026; virtual conference December 2-4, 2026
2026 Virtual STELLA! (Science, Engineering, and Technology Library Leaders in Action), Friday, December 11, 2026
249th AAS meeting, January 10-14, 2027, Salt Lake City UT, USA
AAAS Annual Meeting, February 18-20, 2027, Chicago IL, USA
ACRL, April 7-10, 2027, Portland, OR USA
ALA 2027 Annual Conference, June 24–28, 2027, New Orleans, Louisiana
Additionally:
- AIS Conferences across the world are happening all the time.
- And don’t forget to check ASIS&T’s own Events Calendar for all kinds of enticing things!
Categories
Member’s Corner
Volume 53, Issue 4 —— Fall 2026
Esther Perez, Sheila Bryant, and Jeffra Bussmann published their research article in the Journal of Academic Librarianship!!! [open access]
Toward STEM library guides for positive social change: Exploring the presence of social justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion concepts on chemistry, mathematics, and physics LibGuides https://authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S0099-1333(26)00114-X