Discovery, Management, and Preservation of Geospatial Data Using Hydra

As a growing number of disciplines adopt geospatial technologies in their research, the need for access to geospatial data, in a variety of formats, has grown dramatically. For librarians to meet this demand, we also need to provide preservation, curation, metadata, and discovery services. GeoHydra, our open source toolkit and set of practices, provides these services for Stanford's libraries. We incorporate a variety of geospatial content types from raster imagery to scientific vector data to georeferenced scanned maps, and provide a data model for repositories. We demonstrate the potential of a new architecture and practice for librarianship for geospatial data using the Hydra framework. The digitization and georeferencing of historic map collections, streamlining the acquisition and cataloging of vendor-supplied data, shared cataloging of geographic resources, and citation of geospatial research data are all examples of use cases that GeoHydra serves. Our metadata creation and management strategies implement the ISO (International Standards Organization) suite of geographic standards, and a specialized metadata schema for discovery. We developed XSLT transformations, auto-generation of core elements, unique URIs for place names, and cross-institutional data sharing. With these metadata we built a novel geoportal, EarthWorks, to provide end-user discovery for geospatial data layers using GeoBlacklight technology.