GEOPORTAL AS A WAY TO SHARE AND DISCOVER RESEARCH DATA IN GEOSCIENCE (Invited Presentation)

Geoportal provides an effective way to discover and access geospatial datasets between projects and organizations. Many academic libraries have started to develop geodata portal to facilitate federated geospatial information search across different data provider services, as well as sharing the institutional research data. However, academic libraries are facing many challenges in creating the geoportal. These challenges include how to choose and create the cyberinfrastructure for the geoportal development; how to effectively organize the geospatial metadata and develop the data catalog to support the geoportal; how to manage the library’s datasets; and the portal usability design. In this presentation, I will introduce two geoportal projects that developed by an academic library and a collaboration between libraries (in Big Ten Academic Alliance) using two different open-source project frameworks, OpenGeoportal and GeoBlacklight. I will focus on the cyberinfrastructure development, metadata management, as well as data storage perspectives of the projects. In addition, I will introduce the cyberinfrastructure development we have undertaken to connect an institutional repository with geoportal, which made the geospatial data discoverable, accessible, downloadable, and citable. User stories and usage statistics have suggested that these geoportal projects can help to increase the impact of research generated geospatial data, as well as allowing various levels of users to easily discover their interested information.