RESCICOLL: MAKING SCIENTIFIC COLLECTIONS FAIR

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program (NGGDPP) is responsible for establishing and maintaining a national catalog of geological and geophysical data and materials. NGGDPP provides assistance to state geological surveys and Department of Interior bureaus, primarily USGS, to document and preserve these geoscience and other assets. The Registry of Scientific Collections (ReSciColl), created and maintained by NGGDPP, has received major updates over the last 2 years in architecture and feature enhancement, including an interactive map and search interface. The updates are driven by our vision to make these scientific collections more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable). The suite of tools harnessed during these updates demonstrates how these improvements implement controlled vocabularies and drive documentation consistency and search capacity in ReSciColl.

ReSciColl is being integrated with mdEditor for enhanced creation and editing of collection metadata, including access to controlled vocabularies from numerous sources, including the USGS Thesaurus, the Observations Data Model 2 (ODM2), etc. It supports custom views, limiting visibility to only those attributes and connecting vocabularies that are important to a particular type of collection. The web map and search interface will allow viewing and selecting collections, as well as items within and across collections, and the ability to download a selected set of search results. Item-level metadata and file attachments are added to collections via a custom interface with improved error reporting, linking them to the appropriate parent collection metadata in the ReSciColl database. The database is built in MongoDB for speed, flexibility, and scalability as ReSciColl continues to grow.