Modernizing library metadata for historical weather and climate data collections

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Library contains over 300 titles in its collection that are primarily scientific data. The items in this collection are largely bound paper historical weather records published and distributed by various national and regional weather bureaus.

This paper presents a project within the NCAR Library that made these data assets more visible and discoverable for the weather and climate research community. The project centered around the development of an assessment framework, based on geospatial and temporal ranges, with which to prioritize items within the collection for MARC-based metadata upgrades. The second component of this project focused on making these assets more visible outside of the NCAR Library catalog by contributing metadata records to a cross-NCAR data search and discovery system.