In October 2021, IGSN e.V. and DataCite announced a partnership to bring IGSN onto the DataCite infrastructure for global implementation and long-term sustainability. 

As part of this partnership, new samples registered with SESAR will start to follow DataCite’s DOI infrastructure in January 2023, bringing changes to the current IGSN namespace structure and allocation procedure. Legacy (existing) IGSNs will remain as is and will continue to resolve to the current handle server. 

Our primary services will continue to remain the same. SESAR will continue providing IGSNs through the registration process and maintain the metadata profile pages that IGSNs resolve to. In addition, SESAR will continue collecting and maintaining the extended descriptive metadata that are unique to the SESAR community. 

The transition timeline and details will be available before the end of 2022. As we learn more, we will continue to update our users on the specific details impacting SESAR and our community. 

In the meantime, we will be hosting a SESAR information session at the Open Science & Data Help Desk at the AGU Fall Meeting this December organized by ESIP, AGU, and their respective partners. We welcome our user community and interested parties to join us with any questions and concerns. The exact date and time have not been finalized yet, we will communicate it together with the event location as soon as we receive it.

For more information about the changes to the IGSN structure, please get in touch with DataCite at info@datacite.org and support@datacite.org. For additional questions on SESAR sample registration services, please get in touch with us at info@geosamples.org.

IGSN Changes Coming Soon to SESAR

On September 8th, we released a new version of SESAR. As part of this release, SESAR underwent a server migration to AWS cloud infrastructure. This release also includes enhancements and improvements.

Enhancements to SESAR include supporting TIFF images as thumbnails on sample landing pages and  improved function and use of dropdown menu to sort countries in alphabetical order. Improvements include the addition of 10 countries and 3 sample types in vocabularies and terminologies for better metadata accuracy.

Bugs related to ORCID logins, duplicate accounts, and new user account registrations have been resolved.

You can review the full list on the SESAR Release Notes page.

If you have questions about SESAR, please contact info@geosamples.org.

SESAR² v8.1.0 Released

SESAR is scheduled for a server migration to AWS cloud infrastructure which will impact services on Thursday, September 8th, 2022, between 10:00am and 11:00am EDT.

During the scheduled service, the MySESAR dashboard, sample registrations, and SESAR² web services will be unavailable. Please refrain from registering or updating samples during this time.

If you have questions please email info@geosamples.org.

SESAR Service Scheduled for September 8th

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

SESAR² v8.1.0 Released

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