Skolr article in the Miller-McCune Journal

July 22, 2011: The journal Miller-McCune ran an article about the Skolr poster service prototype: Science Posters  Given New Life Online

Here is an excerpt:

"Anyone who has spent time in academia or attended a scientific conference has seen them — the big plastic-laminated posters that are an indispensable element of science communication.

“Posters are a mass of good information,” says Bruce Caron, a social anthropologist and the founder and executive director of the New Media Studio, a nonprofit that uses emerging multimedia technologies to explore the human environment. “They are an entire website, blog or Powerpoint put together on one page by people who are actively involved in research. They’re a succinct representation of the most current information available.”

Science posters are produced in great numbers. James Frew, a professor of geo-informatics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calculates that roughly 250,000 posters are presented at academic professional meetings each year in the U.S. alone, representing some 4,000 person-years of production work. A single large academic meeting may have up to 10,000 posters."

Pictured, a "poster session" at The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2009. A new project, dubbed Skolr, hopes to gather these kinds of posters found at conferences and workshops around the world and archive them in a searchable database. (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)