Interagency Data Stewardship/Identifiers/Glacier Photos

NSIDC'S Glacier Photo Collection

NSIDC's Glacier Photo Collection contains over twelve thousand photos of individual glaciers around the world. The collection is growing rapidly as NSIDC digitizes it's holdings of roughly 150,000 total such photos.

As discussed during the telecon we absolutely need both the ability to cite the data set as a whole and each individual photo in it and the form of the citation is different for each. To whit (from our web site [1]):

To cite the NOAA/NSIDC Glacier Photograph Collection, please use the following citation:

NSIDC/WDC for Glaciology, Boulder, compiler. 2002, updated 2009. Glacier Photograph Collection. Boulder, Colorado USA: National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology. Digital media.

To cite individual photographs taken from the Glacier Photograph Collection, please use the following citation:

Photographer's name. Year photograph was taken. Name of glacier: From the Glacier Photograph Collection. Boulder, Colorado USA: National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology. Digital media.

As for organization, it turned out that different users needed different organizational access... Some search by photographer, some by glacier, some by region, some by time range... so any hierarchical naming scheme would not be optimal for some segment of our user base... so we allow faceted searches and pretty much whatever naming scheme the photographer used originally.... Also, given that often the photographer has referred to their images in some publication using their own naming convention, we need to be able to allow users to find photos using that...

Actually, there are at least 4 versions of each image, the original negative, slide, hardcopy, or plate, the full-res digital image made from the original, a lower-res jpg version, and a really lo-res thumbnail image. It is true that more recent photos may not have a non-digital copy...

The URL to the home page for each photo is of the form http://nsidc.org/cgi-bin/gpd_deliver_jpg.pl?photo_name where depending on the photographer, etc. the photo_name can vary from names of the form photographer_number to glacier_number to some form with a date, to whatever...