We’ve got a grab bag, a smorgasbord, a sampler box of chocolates for you this month. I hope you find lots of favorites below and none of that disappointment when you think it’s going to be a caramel and it’s some kind of orange creme.¹

I had the pleasure of attending the Information Stewardship Forum at the Internet Archive where they used a snowball invite method: the steering committee picked an initial list of invitees, then when you registered the form asked you who else to invite and those recommendees got invites as well. The result was a great mix of 2nd & 3rd social network connections, where you had regular collaborators along with new perspectives. Maybe try it out at your next event?

One of my new favorite projects is Cheryl Phillips’ team at Big Local News. They gather, clean, and organize data about policing, public health, and government from many different local and siloed sources. They teach journalists how to analyze the data and also provide archiving services for data products. News is a rough profession these days and they don’t necessarily teach you how to make a pivot table in journalism school. As a group that believes data stewardship is for everyone, we appreciate programs that meet people where they are on their data journey.

Congrats to Aaron Kornbluth and Jake Spencer on the beta launch of MarineID Pro. If you're working with ocean PDFs that contain text descriptions, images, and maybe some data too, they've tuned an LLM to identify marine species and extract information in a reusable form. Go test it out.

The Taskforce on Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) has been rolling out a whole series of materials in the wake of their data recommendations in November. Check out their webinars if you want to learn more about how good data documentation, and designing for interoperability, is important for businesses as well as for science.

Finally, you may have caught wind of this buzzy (paywalled) Cut article on friction maxxing. IDEO got there about a year before in a piece about convenience killing the magic of an experience. Being an ocean-head, I think about graphs of the sharp increase in global fishing catch as diesel-powered engines expanded in the wake of World War II.² Being more efficient had benefits for fishing businesses but not always for fish, which led to some notable re-introductions of inefficiency, like making oyster harvesting sailboat- only in the Chesapeake Bay. As I head off into a spring break I am definitely thinking about how to appreciate the time in between, not just the endpoints.

-Kate