The NODC Archive Management System: archiving marine data for ocean exploration and beyond

The stewardship of the nation's oceanographic data archive is an essential responsibility of the U.S. National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC). The NODC continues to focus on the long-term preservation, integrity, and accessibility of irreplaceable observational data through multiple technological and scientific generations. Recently implemented processes improve the ability of NODC to meet data archive stewardship responsibilities, expand online data discovery and retrieval services, and provide adequate supporting metadata to guide use of the archived data. The NODC Archive Management System (AMS) facilitates accessioning and archiving oceanographic data and information, and disseminating data and information in a web-enabled, browser-based environment NODC's collection of over 21,000 unique accessioned datasets, ranging from individual observations to large collections by major programs, is documented and discoverable in this unified system. A growing collection of digital data obtained by the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration (OE) are archived at NODC and accessible through the generic AMS search and retrieval sub-system (the Ocean Archive System, or OAS, at http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/Archive/Search/). This paper briefly describes the four major components of the AMS (Accession Tracking Data Base, File Management, NODC Metadata Manager and Repository, and OAS) and the relationship between the AMS and other parts of the end-to-end data management capabilities developed to manage OE data.