Curating a 23-year weekly time-series of oceanographic data in Monterey Bay, California, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the data

Type of resource
still image
Dataset
Imprint
September 8, 2016
Date modified
February 16, 2023
Date created
September 8, 2016

Digital content

Context

Item belongs to a collection

Stanford Libraries staff presentations, publications, and research

Presentations, publications and research produced and contributed by the staff of Stanford Libraries on a broad range of topics relevant to academic and research libraries.
Digital collection
104 digital items

Description

Creators/Contributors

Author
Whitmire, Amanda

Abstract/Contents

Abstract
In 1951, the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University became a partner in the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations (CalCOFI) program in order to collect oceanographic data in and near Monterey Bay. The aim of the program was to conduct joint fisheries-oceanographic cruises that would help researchers understand what contributed to observed fluctuations in the California sardine fishery. Hopkins conducted weekly sampling (more or less) continuously from March 1951 through June 1974. The raw and aggregated data for most of these cruises currently reside in analog form (handwritten data logs, annual reports, etc.) in the library at the Hopkins Marine Station. The dataset includes variables such as temperature, salinity, oxygen, phosphate, silicate, phytoplankton and zooplankton community structure and abundance, meteorological conditions, fish and marine mammal counts, and more. The collection includes forty-four 3-ring or loose-bound notebooks, twenty-two small, bound notebooks, minutes from annual meetings, annual data reports, and other ephemera. The Hopkins CalCOFI collection is large, completely analog, and very heterogeneous. We are in the early phases of planning a curation strategy, but our general objectives for the dataset are to digitize it, add metadata, convert sampling data to actionable formats, and make it all public. This poster presents a description of the collection, our proposed general approach toward curating it, and discusses some potential challenges. [presented at The Rescue of Data At Risk workshop in Boulder, CO, on 8–9 September 2016. Co-hosted by the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA)].

Bibliographic information

Preferred citation
Whitmire, Amanda (2016). Curating a 23-year weekly time-series of oceanographic data in Monterey Bay, California, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the data. Presented at The Rescue of Data At Risk workshop. Stanford Digital Repository. Poster. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/hp802gp8515
Location
https://purl.stanford.edu/hp802gp8515

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License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Librarian view | DRUID: hp802gp8515