Recent Announcements


 
12-2008 SESAR presentations at the upcoming AGU Fall Meeting. link
Oral Presentation IN31D-03
Wednesday, 12/17 0830h
Snyder, W. S.Lehnert, K. A., Ito, E., Harms, U., Klump, J.
GeosciNET: Building a Global Geoinformatics Partnership

Poster IN51A-1148
Friday, 12/18 0800h
Lehnert, K. A., Walker, J. D., Block, K. A., Vinay, S.
EarthChem and SESAR: Data Resources and Interoperability for EarthScope Cyberinfrastructure
   
9-2008 eResearch Australasia
Melbourne, Australia Meeting Program
September 29th to October 3rd, 2008
Plenary by K. Lehnert
Full-Day Workshop
   
9-2008 6th International Conference on Mineralogy and Museums, Denver
Colorado School of Mines, Golden Colorado USA
September 7-9, 2008

Carl Francis, Kerstin Lehnert, & Charles Langmuir: Expanding Collections Access: The Online Sample Curation System
   
8-2008 9th International Kimberlite Conference
Download the abstract
August 10-15, 2008
Frankfurt, Germany

K Lehnert and J Klump, "Facilitating Research in Mantle Petrology with Geoinformatics", Poster
   
8-2008 Collaboration with EarthTime and the EarthChem Geochronology database to create web service for assignment of IGSNs.
EarthChem, EarthTime and SESAR are currently working together to create IGSNs "on-the-fly" via web service registration of samples.
   
8-2008 Smithsonian Institution to register volcanic glass (VG) samples with SESAR
The Smithsonian is in discussions with SESAR to register its collection of volcanic glasses (VG) from ocean floor dredges. Data from the well-known VG samples is currently served by PetDB, which will display IGSNs in a forthcoming new version of the database.
   
2-2007 SESAR and the Index for Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) of the US National Geophysical Data Center NGDC jointly organized a workshop for curators and Geoinformatics experts to discuss the application of the International Geo Sample Number IGSN in the actual curatorial environment.
The objective of the workshop was to define procedures for sample registration with SESAR in a way that they complement existing practices in sample collection, sample curation, and sample metadata management in the field and in the curatorial and academic environment. Workshop participants included curators of marine, lacustrine, and terrestrial core and rock repositories and museums, and data managers and system engineers of major digital sample catalogs. The group met for 1.5 days at the UCAR Center Green Facility in Boulder, CO, and engaged in highly dynamic discussions, addressing topics ranging from the design of forms for the capture and submission of sample metadata to the use of common vocabularies and classification schemes for geological samples to the development of an XML schema for sample metadata to the application of bar code printers and scanners in sample curation. The participants successfully agreed on a set of recommendations for best practices and procedures that will become available on the SESAR web site in April 2007 and will be presented at the 30th Anniversary Meeting of the Curator's Group in Boulder in September 2007.
   
1-2007 Nearly 50,000 mineral specimens from the Mineralogical and Geological Museum at Harvard University have been registered at SESAR.
Nearly 50,000 mineral specimens from the Mineralogical and Geological Museum at Harvard University have been registered at SESAR. The Mineralogical and Geological Museum holds vast geological collections that have been assembled since the late eighteenth century, and represent a legacy of vigorous research and teaching in various fields of geology including mineralogy, petrology, and mining geology. The Harvard mineral collection, acquired mostly by donation or purchase of private collections and individual specimens, is the most important of the collections, ranking among the world's finest due to its very broad representation, wealth of rare species, large number of specimens described in the scientific literature, and the quality of its display specimens.