LTER Site Byte

LTER Site: McMurdo Dry Valleys

Contributor: Chris Gardner (Aug 03, 2005)

Site Byte:

This year has been one of transition for MCM in terms of information management. The data management operations were moved from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where a student acted part time as the data manager, to Ohio State, where I will operate full time for the next couple years. We purchased a brand new SunFire V480 server with Solaris 10, and I've been working to get our Oracle database and GIS capabilities operating on the new machine. In addition, I have redesigned the look and feel of the website and hope to go live with it this fall at a new domain: www.mcmlter.org.

We have formed a "data management subgroup," which is comprised of one representative from each of the PIs' research groups. We recently met at the MCM LTER meeting in Portland, OR where we discussed ways to improve the data submission process and streamline our operation. I have also been sifting through our core and legacy data to ensure that we have no gaps in our database, and verifying my findings with this group. Our hope is that the subgroup will make the data management aspect of science more interactive for the MCM researchers, and therefore everyone will take a more active role.

Overall we're making a lot of progress at MCM, and after we have our database up-to-date and new website up, we can start to work on the metadata conversion to EML. Sorry I can't make it to the meeting this year!

Web design by Wade Sheldon, Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER