Military librarians tour AEDC, visit technical library

  • Published
  • By Philip Lorenz III
  • AEDC/PA
Arnold Air Force Base, Tenn. --  Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC) recently hosted a visit from 30 librarians who had been in Nashville attending the annual Military Libraries Workshop, sponsored by the Special Library Association.

Fred Rascoe, Information International Associates' team lead at the AEDC Technical Library, had extended an invitation to the librarians from the SLA's military library division at the conference to visit the base and get a tour of the ground testing facilities.

"The Special Library Association is a national organization of libraries that are unique," he explained. "They're not representative of the typical public or academic library. They have special functions and audiences, such as AEDC and the technical library here.

"That organization has a subdivision called the military library division," he continued. "They came to see the library, the workplace and meet a few folks. They work with us virtually all year, but this way we can put names to faces and things like that."

Emily Mardis, the current chair of the military libraries division of the SLA, is also the chief of the research element with the 53rd Electronic Warfare Wing of the 453rd Electronic Warfare Squadron at Lackland Air Force Base (AFB), Texas. She said that the visit to AEDC provided her with a different perspective on the Air Force from the standpoint of the mission.

"It's always good to see how somebody else does something and the type of focus they have, because AEDC has a specifically different mission [than the one at my command]," she said. "Where I work, we do studies of the systems that are on the airframes.

"Now that I know the depth of the modeling and simulations being done here, I know we will have some good contacts for some of my engineers who need the data that they haven't been able to get, such as signatures and RCFs on the plane."

Darrell Shiplett, who works at the Technical Research Library with the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB, Calif., had been to AEDC before. However, this time he had the opportunity to see more of the facilities and the library.

"The big thing that we want to do, like with Edwards, Arnold and Eglin AFB, is focus on cooperative efforts to the point where we don't duplicate our efforts, but complement each other in our collections and our services. It makes the acquisition process more seamless and when you can streamline something, it's always good."

Suzanne Ryder, the chief librarian at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., was impressed with what she saw at AEDC.

"There are so many scientific and technical libraries and they're all unique in a certain way and [its impact on the users] depends upon your mission," she said. "I came from a facility before that had a test and evaluation mission, but not to the extent and completeness of this one, so I am very interested."

Marybeth Dowdell, the head of the technical reports collections at the Naval Research Lab, accompanied Ryder. They said this visit helped them to see an opportunity for future professional collaboration between AEDC and her organization.

"We represent the Navy's corporate science library," Ryder said. "From many of those on the engineering side, they can come to us and because of the open literature we have an extensive collection. They may not be aware of what's available here and that would be another way to link up with one another - so that we could compare and share."

Patrick Dearing, with Landmark Recorded Books, the company that sponsored the trip from the conference, said he enjoyed visiting and touring a place like Arnold.

"We've always had strong support for the military librarians' workshop and this ends up being an opportunity for us to [provide] special support [by] underwriting the cost of doing the tour, giving special items to the customers," he said. "[This visit] was a great opportunity for me to tag along, see what's behind the scenes of the military libraries and watch the social atmosphere of all the librarians interacting with each other. This gives them a face-to-face where they can share resources, get up to date on what they have here [at this technical library and in the way of ground test facilities]."