TWO DECADES OF EARTHCHEM AND SESAR: A MULTI-FACETED APPROACH TO PROVIDING SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITY DATA SERVICES

In 2004, EarthChem and SESAR, the System for Earth Sample Registration, started the development of data services that have continued to operate uninterruptedly until today. Thousands of researchers world-wide now use these services to publish and access curated, high-quality geochemical data in the EarthChem Library and the PetDB database and to register their samples in the SESAR metadata catalog so that they have a Persistent Identifier (IGSN) and can be found, accessed, reused, and linked to data and publications. This presentation will provide a synopsis of the diverse and evolving strategies that EarthChem and SESAR employed over the two decades to ensure that their services continue to be available and useful for the community.

EarthChem and SESAR have been built and operated with funding from the US National Science Foundation, initially as independent project and since 2010 as part of the Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance IEDA and IEDA2. The creation of IEDA in 2010 was a significant step toward sustainability consolidating the substantial number of separately operated data systems at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory into a single Cooperative Agreement to streamline management and take advantage of synergies. Besides such organizational steps to make operations more stable and share expertise and infrastructure, the most important strategy has been to maintain a very close connection to the user community and align systems and services with the evolving needs of researchers. Providing indispensable services is one of the primary requirements for sustainability of repositories. The addition of the Astromaterials Data System, funded by NASA, has stabilized the financial foundation of the team as its software ecosystem complements that of EarthChem so that technical developments can be shared.

In the near future, IEDA2 will engage the US Geoscience community in developing a roadmap for future infrastructure of sample and lab analytical data, under the leadership of the IEDA2 Community Advisory Board. Collaboration will continue with national and international data infrastructures in the OneGeochemistry initiative to identify solutions for a sustainable global geochemistry data network. Long-term sustainability of SESAR is being addressed by the iSamples initiative that is moving sample registration services toward a national infrastructure.