Data management workflows at the United States Antarctic Program Data Center (USAP-DC)

Data collected in Polar Regions such as Antarctica are often acquired under substantial and expensive logistical effort. It is therefore essential to ensure that these data are archived in way that they can be used by other researchers. The USAP Data Center (USAP-DC; www.usap-dc.org), operated as part of the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA), contributes to the broader preservation of research data acquired with funding from NSF's Office of Polar Programs by providing a repository for diverse data from the Antarctic region. Data types hosted span the range of Antarctic research from snow radar to volcano observatory video imagery to penguin counts to paleo-geologic maps to meteorological model outputs. In addition, USAP-DC is supporting scientists with their registration of data descriptions into the international Antarctic Master Directory (AMD), which serves as a central metadata catalog resource linking to data files hosted in these external repositories.

We have redesigned our data submission tools to collect a broader range of discovery and preservation metadata, including links to Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs). In addition to a basic data description metadata we collect information on data acquisition instruments, procedures and data processing steps, which is valuable information for future use and for combining different datasets. Whenever possible we link publications to the datasets since those often include additional information. Each data submission is reviewed and verified by a specialist from the USAP-DC/NSIDC team depending on disciplinary focus of the submission to ensure the completeness and quality of the data submissions. These details are made available to users through dataset landing pages.