SESAR is kicking off fall with GSA in Pittsburgh, October 15 – 18th. Curators from SESAR and our partner systems, EarthChem Library, LEPR, and Astromat will be at booth #921 at the exhibitor showcase. 

We are also conducting short interviews during GSA 2023 to better understand how SESAR users (and potential SESAR users) work with samples 

Results from the interviews will inform immediate and long-term improvements to the search interfaces, data submission processes, usability, and interoperability of existing community-curated databases and repositories, and will guide development of resources and support for researchers.

Interviews are anticipated to last approximately 20 minutes and study participants will receive compensation for their time. We are interested in gathering data from as many disciplines and career stages as possible, and encourage students and early career researchers to participate. We are also interested in hearing from collections managers, those who have experience with multi-institutional collaborative grants involving sample collection and sharing, and analytical lab leadership.

Contact Dr. Natalie Raia at nraia@arizona.edu with questions or to schedule time to participate, and visit us at our booth (#921) at GSA! If you are unable to join us at GSA, please consider participating at AGU. We hope to see you there!

SESAR (IEDA2) Booth at GSA 2023

On May 23rd, we held a webinar hosted by the ESIP Physical Samples Cluster. At this webinar, we focused on the changes we have recently made to SESAR due to the ‘new IGSN’ and other ongoing developments, including the iSamples Project, that we plan to integrate. As part of this webinar, we also invited our users to partake in a short questionnaire to help us identify improvements and offer feedback on how to support our community better.

If you missed the webinar and want to watch the recording, please visit the ESIP YouTube page.

Help us improve SESAR by participating in our short questionnaire that is also available via the QR code at the end of the recording.

Recording of SESAR Presentation Hosted by ESIP

We invite you to join us for our virtual meeting at the ESIP Physical Samples Cluster on May 23, 2023, at 5pm EDT. At this meeting, SESAR will provide a presentation about the changes we have recently made to SESAR as a consequence of the ‘new IGSN’ and other ongoing developments. We want to listen to your needs and ideas for improvements, and future features of SESAR (e.g., functions, interfaces, community governance) so the system can best serve you.

Please register here for the zoom link. We hope to see you next week at the webinar!

Date: Tuesday, May 23rd
Time: 5 p.m. – 6 p.m. EDT

SESAR Webinar Hosted by ESIP on May 23rd

Join our Introducing SESAR "2.0" Webinar

We’re thrilled to announce that SESAR “2.0” and our new website are officially live. This release is the biggest update to SESAR since its 2004 founding, with new and improved functionality and UI.

Our new guide provides more information on how to use SESAR and documents our updated vocabularies and metadata schema. 

If you want to get familiar and practice registering samples, please use our sandbox. These samples will not be officially registered and can be used as your personal scratch space.

As part of our revamp, all users are now subscribed to a user listserv. We will be sending periodic emails to our users with system updates and notifications. 

Additionally, we have two webinar sessions to showcase these upgrades:

To sign up for the webinar, please fill out this form. Once you do, we will send a calendar invite. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at info@geosamples.org.

Thank you,
SESAR Team

Introducing SESAR "2.0" and Webinars Dates

If you run into any issues or have feedback, please reach out to info@geosamples.org. Be sure to join one of our webinar sessions Introducing SESAR "2.0" on October 8th and 9th!

MySESAR is now live!

The Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) that has been developed and maintained by NOAA’s NCEI, has been decommissioned and will no longer be accessible on the NCEI web site starting May 5, 2025. In order to ensure continued access and updates to the IMLGS, SESAR and NCEI have agreed that SESAR will take over stewardship of this resource. SESAR staff is working with NCEI and the marine and lacustrine repository community to ensure persistence of this valuable resource. 

SESAR is planning a phased approach to continuing the services of the IMLGS: 

Phase Ia (completed December 1, 2025): Provide access to the current content of the IMLGS. SESAR will create a user interface for searching the current IMLGS and displaying search results. The priority is to make the contents of the IMLGS accessible again as quickly as possible and minimize downtime after the May 5 shutdown of NCEI-based Interactive Map Tool.

Phase Ib (completed February 10, 2026): SESAR has assumed management of the IMLGS Curators Listserv, previously hosted by NCEI. This listserv is an unmoderated forum for discussion and announcements related to the Curators group and Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) database. To join the listserv, request to join here (log in to a Google email account first, or email info@geosamples.org to be manually added to the list): https://groups.google.com/a/geosamples.org/g/imlgs

Phase II (in progress, requires additional funding): Fully integrate the IMLGS services with SESAR. SESAR is starting to work with NCEI and contributing sample repositories to understand their needs and desires for a streamlined data ingest process and user needs for search. Based on these needs and desires, we will generate an implementation plan and try to identify sources of funding to perform the necessary technical developments.

Please note that much of the IMLGS data remains accessible also via GeoMapApp here.

We are grateful for the many notes of support we have received from the community reiterating the importance of the IMLGS resource and expressing gratitude to SESAR for helping to steward this resource in the future. We thank the community for your continued support and patience with this transition. 

If you have questions or comments, please reach out to us at info@geosamples.org.

sesar

Recording of SESAR Presentation Hosted by ESIP

Recent Posts