Sedimental Values: Digging In to La Brea’s Past

Aisling Farrell is one of the Collections Managers at La Brea Tar Pits Museum. She oversees the research collection of over 3.5 million fossils, all the related field notes, accessions, catalogs, curation, database, loans, and researcher coordination at the Museum. She is part of a team that excavates and prepares fossils onsite 361 days a year at La Brea Tar Pits. The Museum is open to the public 7 days a week and engages in numerous community science projects, tours, presentations, as well as active scientific research. She is coordinating the Zooniverse "Sedimental Values" project on the Museum side, and eventual migration of these data into the collections management database.

Andrea Thomer is an assistant professor of information. She conducts interdisciplinary research in the areas of scientific data curation and data practices; "science of science" -- "meta" examinations of how scientific research gets done; and computer supported cooperative work in scholarly research settings. She is especially interested in long-term data curation and infrastructure sustainability -- on the scale of decades rather than just years; the creation and application of data and metadata standards; the impact of information organization and structure on information use; and issues of data provenance, reproducibility, and integration.

Justin Schell is the Director of the Shapiro Design Lab, a peer and engaged learning community in the University of Michigan Library. As part of his work in the Design Lab, he facilitates a number of community and citizen science projects, including the use of open source hardware with environmental justice community advocates, online crowdsourcing projects through the Zooniverse platform, and projects that increase the availability and accessibility of environmental data. In addition to his work at the Design Lab, he is a filmmaker, visual artist, and podcast producer.

Michael Lenard is a project manager and research assistant for Andrea Thomer’s Lab, with Master's degrees in chemistry and information science from the University of Michigan. He is interested in issues involving the complex interface between information institutions and scientific research. He seeks ways to promote understanding, improved communication, and more effective collaboration between those who collect and use scientific research data and those who curate, maintain, and preserve it. He hopes to contribute in some way to developing more cohesive, open, and equitable scientific practices.

Faye Polasek is a current undergraduate student at the University of Michigan. Her academic interests include library sciences and information technology. She has pursued research on natural science data curation and management as well as library systems and data reuse at a variety of levels. She is pursuing a bachelor of arts in cognitive science with a focus on cognition and decision, and hopes to engage in future studies and research on the intersection of decision and the information sciences.