.@guertin has deposited her #AGU13 poster @ScholarSphere: http://t.co/CYbpaG9aIS. Great example of sharing knowledge!

— Patricia Hswe (@pmhswe) December 16, 2013

I recently gave a poster presentation at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco on  December 12.  One of the challenges of giving a poster presentation is making sure that those that came by my poster have the opportunity to go back and review the information I presented when he/she is ready to “process” that information.  For example, the AGU conference had close to 3,000 poster presentations each day of the 5-day meeting, and then many, many oral presentations.  As attendees at AGU, we try to gather as much information as possible, but many times, we cannot even begin to process what we learned until days/weeks after the conference (especially when the conference takes place during the last week of classes or final exam week!).

I’m excited about a new service Penn State is offering to faculty/staff/students that allows us to archive our abstracts, posters, and any other professional materials – a service that will even allow non-Penn State people to access my presentation materials.  Allow me to introduce you to ScholarSphere!

What is ScholarSphere?

ScholarSphere is a secure repository service enabling the Penn State community to share its research and scholarly work with a worldwide audience. Faculty, staff, and students can use ScholarSphere to collect their work in one location and create a durable and citeable record of their papers, presentations, publications, data sets, or other scholarly creations. Through this service, Penn State researchers can also comply with grant-funding-agency requirements for sharing and managing research data.

In ScholarSphere, I was able to upload my abstract and a PDF file of my poster.  I set the access to this record as “open access,” so that anyone with the URL to my record and/or if they search for my name in the repository, they can find my conference materials.  I’m looking forward to uploading past and future materials to the site – it will be nice to have one place that will serve as a snapshot and archive of my professional dissemination activities.

And here is the link to my 2013 AGU abstract and poster! https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/7d279302z

I’m also looking forward to using ScholarSphere to archive not only my research results, but the outcomes of undergraduate student research.  If you want to see a great example of how this repository is being used, see how a Penn State entomologist is using ScholarSphere to document a rare insect collection.