Sampling Nature RCN Webinar: Lindsay Powers, USGS on Friday, Sept 8 at 1pm ET
Please join the Sampling Nature RCN on Friday, September 8 at 1pm ET for our webinar with Dr. Lindsay Powers, USGS on "Connecting Samples to the Research Ecosystem through Documentation and Discovery Tools"
Register here. The abstract and Lindsay's bio are below.
Please share with your networks and I hope to see you there!
Best,
Erin
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Webinar Abstract: Physical samples are often expensive and irreplaceable assets foundational to understanding the universe and its processes, and they should be preserved and made available for ongoing or new research. For these assets to be useful in this capacity, they must have descriptive documentation and be readily discoverable to interdisciplinary users. Persistent unique identifiers (PIDs) for people, organizations, data, publications, scientific collections, and samples, greatly facilitate the discovery of relevant physical samples for new research by connecting samples to all elements of the research ecosystem.
The U.S. Geological Survey has improved tools to better document scientific collections and samples and connect research assets through persistent unique identifiers. Among these, the mdEditor is a metadata creation and editing tool developed collaboratively with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife service to broadly facilitate rich metadata description for multiple domain data, sample, and collection types. The mdEditor has been adapted to create descriptions for physical scientific collections, which are cataloged in the Registry of Scientific Collections (ReSciColl). In addition, we are developing the AIS (Asset Identification Service) to manage and provision persistent unique identifiers; DOIs for data, publications, and scientific collections; International Generic Sample Numbers (IGSN) for physical samples; PIDs for metadata records and others as needed. ReSciColl provides the opportunity to include PIDs for people (ORCID), organizations (ROR), collections data and publications (DOI), and physical samples (IGSN). Consistent use of PIDs in our enterprise systems, provides an explicit mechanism for asset interoperability and assures that these valuable resources can be discovered and assessed for relevance for new discovery.
Speaker Bio: Lindsay is trained as a multidisciplinary scientist with an education and research experience in aquatic ecology, population genetics, limnology, and paleoclimatology. Lindsay completed her B.A at Macalester College, her M.S. at University of Montana, and her Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Her current work at the U.S. Geological Survey is primarily concerned with preserving, modernizing, and facilitating access to scientific collections of physical samples. Lindsay is the Program Coordinator for the National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program and Director of the USGS Geological Materials Repository, home to the Core Research Center and the National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility.