Modernizing Library Metadata for Historical Weather and Climate Data Collections

For libraries to become more visible and integral within the scientific data ecosystem, they must find ways to connect with external communities, systems, and standards. 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 article 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. We present an approach to conducting a transformation from MARC to the ISO 19115 geospatial metadata standard, and discuss how to make this transform more robust. If the value and utility of library-housed data collections like these are to be fully realized, library metadata must circulate beyond the traditional boundaries of library institutions.