Southern Ocean Decade & Polar Data Forum Week 2021

Online, 20 - 24 September 2021 An Ocean Of Opportunities

Spotlighting Arctic Data Collections with the DataONE Portals Infrastructure

Amber E Budden, Matthew B. Jones, Chris S. Jones, Lauren Walker, Robyn Thiessen-Bock and Erin McLean

Federation across large numbers of diverse, geographically dispersed, data repositories supporting Arctic research data provides significant advances for discovery, accessibility and reuse. However, Arctic data are preserved across a broad collection of repositories including domain specific repositories, generalist repositories and institutional repositories that also hold significant collections of data not related to the Arctic. Consequently, while federated networks enable data to be discovered from a single location, the level of precision and specificity required for specialist fields cannot be met using a generic search. At DataONE, we provide portal infrastructure to enable organizations, research groups, and collaborations to build customized data discovery portals that collate and present a curated subset of the full data catalog. For example, researchers have created portals to organize data on the circumpolar active layer (CALM), for settlement and historical church surveys in Iceland, and to collate research products from the Toolik Field Station in Alaska. These data portals incorporate user defined search queries across all metadata fields, enabling portal creators to build faceted search terms that have direct relevance to their research community and the data they are exposing. Portals include customizable branding options to effectively represent the organization or research collaboration, and free text pages for descriptive content. In addition to the rich search and discovery capabilities, portals include FAIR assessment of metadata quality and aggregated data usage and citation metrics. The current release of data portals reflects the outcome of ongoing usability assessment and community engagement. Portal development is informed by user experience feedback and recent focus groups have provided additional insights in how the community use, and want to extend, these services. In this talk we will provide an overview of the portal features and future functionality, in addition to describing our design process and opportunities for interaction.