Tasks and Roles of the Information Management Committee  - August 01 – Karen Baker, reporter

A discussion of the information management committee tasks and roles

was conducted in response to the recognition that our larger group

brings new requirements for coordination.  Mechanisms were discussed to

facilitate the committee's work through task organization and distribution. 

The goal is to consider structures that enable us to be more internally

responsive and to bring closure to activities. The task list developed at

the IM Exec meeting (Apr01) was presented and discussed.  The group augmented

the list and considered options for grouping tasks into categories:

I. Coordination (Keeper of the Lists)

   -Meetings & Reports (IM, IMexec, Standing Comm)

   -Multi-level Communications

      -newsletter, webpages, calendars, committees

   -Mentoring

   -Training IM & Technology

      -Large-scale and small-scale approaches

      -National and international

   -Products-past and future

   -Identify/coordinate funding for communications & training

II. Liaison with LTER CC  (Inreach)

   -Facilitate IM/CC bi-directional communications

   -Interface with NSF and with CC

   -Vision development-white papers

   -NIS LTER IM Project Development

   -Identify/coordinate funding opportunities for vision/NIS development

III. Liaison with Partnerships (Outreach)

   -National(current): KDI

   -National(future): Ecoinformatics

   -National (future): Partnership for Biodiversity & Informatics

   -International: ILTER

   -Identify/coordinate funding opportunities within partnerships

In a round-table discussion, there was a general emphasis on the

need for communications.  It was decided to keep a streamlined

annual Information Managers Meeting Report. It was noted that

attention must be given to ensuring documents are placed in the LTER

document archive.