Self-deposit, discovery, and delivery of scientific GIS datasets using GeoHydra

Presentation at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

General Track Papers and Panels

We present the architecture of a geospatial digital library and a case study of its use for a scientific GIS dataset self-deposited by marine ecologist Malin Pinsky. In this case, he was published in a journal article [1] for research on Pacific salmon conservation conducted while at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. He subsequently self-deposited his research data for preservation in our institutional repository [2, 3] and we provided full discovery and delivery services for his scientific GIS dataset through our geospatial digital library and spatial data infrastructure. The Stanford Digital Repository (SDR; http://sdr.stanford.edu) is an institutional repository for scholarly information resources with holdings of over 120 terabytes and 180 million files. Faculty, students, and researchers can promote, describe, share, and preserve their work via self-deposit. When we developed a geospatial digital library as a full-service repository for scientific GIS datasets, we kept a few key goals in mind: (1) to manage these assets as durable digital library objects within our institutional Fedora repository; (2) to search and deliver them via a spatial data infrastructure; (3) to discover and use them via a variety of applications and contexts; and (4) to curate them via the open and collaboratively maintained Hydra ecosystem.