Relocating the Antarctic Core Collection: The Story of a Large-Scale Data Rescue Initiative for an Historic Collection of Geologic Samples

The story the Antarctic Core Collection's (ACC) transition from Florida State University (FSU) to Oregon State University (OSU) is one of the largest-scale data rescue efforts in recent history. The ACC is the world's largest collection of seafloor sediment samples from the Southern Ocean. The collection was officially established in 1963 as the US Antarctic Program took shape. For the next fifty years, the collection grew to represent the scientific discoveries of over one-hundred and twenty research cruises and expeditions around Antarctica. FSU hosted the irreplaceable collection at its Antarctic Research Facility, an iconic lab in the center of campus. In 2016, the university chose not to renew its contract for supporting the facility. Recognizing the value and potential of the collection, the National Science Foundation began a search for another university to host these important samples and enable future research. In 2017, OSU's Marine and Geology Repository (OSU-MGR) initiated a plan to relocate this historic collection of over eighteen kilometers of core samples from Tallahassee, FL to Corvallis, OR. The project began by planning and constructing a state-of-the-art facility with temperature-controlled space to house the next fifty years of coring expeditions to the Southern Oceans and beyond. In the summer of 2018, the ACC was carefully packaged, digitally inventoried, and shipped to OSU. In this process, the OSU-MGR staff have worked to improve metadata records to build an effective modern inventory of the ACC using new digital collection management techniques, including QR coded labels and scanners. These metadata are managed on tablets with the OSU-MGR App and indexed in an Elasticsearch cluster to streamline the repository's workflows and to display summary statistics. Current and future curation projects will comply with FAIR data principles, with the goal of making all OSU-MGR collections and associated datasets more easily discoverable online.