MARINE REALMS INFORMATION BANK: A DIGITAL LIBRARY OF COASTAL AND MARINE SCIENCE FOR SCIENTISTS, EDUCATORS, PUBLIC SERVANTS, AND CONCERNED CITIZENS

The Marine Realms Information Bank (MRIB; http://mrib.usgs.gov/) is a distributed geolibrary including georeferenced scientific information about oceans, coasts, and coastal watersheds. The MRIB user searches a collection of metadata records for information about specific places or topics and then links to the original online resources on servers distributed across the Internet. MRIB shares its database with the regionally focused Monterey Bay Science Digital Library (http://mrib.usgs.gov/mbs/) and the thematically focused Coastal Change Hazards Digital Library (http://mrib.usgs.gov/cch/), but these libraries employ different user interfaces to target their intended audiences.

Unlike an Internet search engine, a digital library helps users cope with large amounts of unfiltered online information by offering carefully selected and indexed resources accessed through a knowledge organization system (KOS). For MRIB, the KOS is a topical classification with 12 categories to guide users through the language and concepts of coastal and marine science. For geographic searching, MRIB includes a gazetteer and an interactive map interface based on Generic Mapping Tools (GMT).

MRIB offers searches by category, keyword, and location. Users can browse the KOS for specific authors, agencies, disciplines, issues, or product types; search MRIB metadata for keywords or phrases; zoom in on a map; or select named locations from the gazetteer. These operations can be applied repeatedly, in any combination, until the search is appropriately focused. MRIB displays search results in browsable tables and interactive maps and provides links to the original online resources. Searches can be performed interactively at the MRIB website, or metadata records can be harvested by calling a URL that includes the desired search parameters.

Every entry in MRIB is assigned an electronic index card (EIC) that includes controlled-vocabulary terms for the categories in the KOS, additional keywords, geographic coordinates, and the network location (URL) of the original online resource. MRIB features an EIC Creation Utility to guide users through a step-by-step procedure for contributing online resources to MRIB. The MRIB custodians review all user contributions for suitability and accuracy before including them in the database.