On the Mission to Archive Current and Legacy Paleo- and Rock Magnetic Datasets for Rapid Online Retrieval and Compilation

The Magnetics Information Consortium (MagIC) mission is to archive the wealth of rock- and paleomagnetic raw data and interpretations from studies on natural and synthetic samples. However, most of the associated paleo- and rock magnetic publications only include summary results, often representing high-level interpretations far removed from original laboratory experiments and the raw data. Access to these raw data is critical to scientific progress, for example in case of new synthesis studies or when updating results based on new interpretation and analysis methods. MagIC can store these measurement-level raw data in its holdings for both legacy and current publications. An advanced drilldown filtering/sorting search interface liberates these "deep" data and allows users to view plots in typical paleo- and rock magnetic maps, equal area plots, and Zijderveld diagrams. MagIC has also developed a suite of offline and online tools to provide the paleomagnetic, rock magnetic, and affiliated scientific communities with the capability to easily contribute both their previously published data and their data undergoing the journal peer-review process, to retrieve well-annotated published interpretations and raw data, and to analyze and visualize large collections of published data online. Many of these tools have been designed for or are being generalized for re-use in other applications on http://earthref.org and in the general scientific community. Here we present the technology we are employing to serve the scientific community as seamlessly as possible. These tools are now in use in dozens of labs, have helped archive many valuable legacy published studies and datasets, and result in new daily contributions to the MagIC database (http://earthref.org/MAGIC/).