Building a Digital Library for Multibeam Data, Images and Documents

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the UCSD Libraries and the San Diego Supercomputing Center have joined forces to establish a digital library for accessing a wide range of multibeam and marine geophysical data, to a community that ranges from the MGG researcher to K-12 outreach clients. This digital library collection will include 233 multibeam cruises with grids, plots, photographs, station data, technical reports, planning documents and publications, drawn from the holdings of the Geological Data Center and the SIO Archives. Inquiries will be made through an Ocean Exploration Console, reminiscent of a cockpit display where a multitude of data may be displayed individually or in two or three-dimensional projections. These displays will provide access to cruise data as well as global databases such as Global Topography, crustal age, and sediment thickness, thus meeting the day-to-day needs of researchers as well as educators, students, and the public. The prototype contains a few selected expeditions, and a review of the initial approach will be solicited from the user community during the poster session. The search process can be focused by a variety of constraints: geospatial (lat-lon box), temporal (e.g., since 1996), keyword (e.g., cruise, place name, PI, etc.), or expert-level (e.g., K-6 or researcher). The Storage Resource Broker (SRB) software from the SDSC manages the evolving collection as a series of distributed but related archives in various media, from shipboard data through processing and final archiving. The latest version of MB-System provides for the systematic creation of standard metadata, and for the harvesting of metadata from multibeam files. Automated scripts will be used to load the metadata catalog to enable queries with an Oracle database management system. These new efforts to bridge the gap between libraries and data archives are supported by the NSF Information Technology and National Science Digital Library (NSDL) programs, augmented by UC funds, and closely coordinated with Digital Library for Earth System Education (DLESE) activities.