Paleonet: Pushing Scientific Ocean Drilling Results to the Desktop

Wed May 2 12:49:49 UTC 2007

This just in.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 25, 2007
CONTACT:  Jon Corsiglia, IODP - U.S. Implementing Organization
(202) 232-3900, jcorsiglia at joiscience.org

Pushing Scientific Ocean Drilling Results to the Desktop

COLLEGE STATION, TX - Published volumes detailing nearly 40 years of
scientific discoveries from ocean drilling research - a vast reservoir
of valuable and citable data for geoscientists - will soon be freely
accessible online. These publications represent the scholarly results of
an important global science endeavor that forever changed mankind¹s
understanding of the Earth.

All findings and data published in volumes from the Ocean Drilling
Program (ODP) are now available at http://www.odplegacy.org (click on
Samples, data & publications.) The second phase of the digitization
project, to be completed by this fall, will bring the Initial Reports of
the Deep Sea Drilling Project series (Volumes 1-96) and other printed
ODP and Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) reports online. The DSDP
publications will be available at http://www.deepseadrilling.org.

The Texas A&M Digital Library, which until recently operated under the
university¹s vice president of research, produced more than 185,000
pages of digital files from original print publications in a joint
venture with ODP. The U.S. National Science Foundation is funding the
project. 

³This makes one of the great bodies of marine geologic literature
easily accessible worldwide,² said Dr. Mitchell Lyle, a professor in
the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University.

ODP was a 20-year international partnership of scientists and research
institutions organized to explore the evolution and structure of the
Earth through scientific ocean drilling. ODP conducted drilling
operations in the world¹s oceans from January 1985 through September
2003. The program succeeded DSDP, which began drilling operations in
1968 and concluded its explorations in 1983. The Integrated Ocean
Drilling Program (IODP) has been building upon the legacy of success of
both its predecessor programs since 2004.

James Allan, IODP program director at the U.S. National Science
Foundation said, ³NSF is delighted that these written results covering
35 years of scientific ocean drilling will be made easily available to
the science community and society at large. We are very grateful for the
efforts of the Texas A&M University Digital Library and Texas A&M
University for serving as a partner in supportin
g this accomplishment,
which provides many enhancements over the original printed versions.²

The Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program includes an Initial
Reports volume of shipboard reports for each ODP research cruise and a
companion Scientific Results volume of peer-reviewed postcruise research
results. ODP first began publishing its Proceedings online in 1997.
Through the digitization effort, scanned versions of ODP Proceedings
volumes originally published between 1986 and 1996 have been made
Web-accessible.

The PDF chapter files generated through the digitization project
started as scanned images of each original page. Through the use of an
optical character recognition process, a searchable text layer was added
to the PDF files, making it possible to copy and paste text from the
final PDF file of each chapter. HTML volume tables of contents provide
online navigation to individual chapter files. The digitized volumes
include links to individual core photographs scanned from original film
as part of a separate ODP legacy project.

Every chapter in both the Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program and
the Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project will have a digital
object identifier (DOI) associated with it. Scholarly and professional
publishers create links between reference lists and the online content
of cited papers using DOIs. With information about DSDP and ODP
publications deposited with the DOI registration agency CrossRef,
publishers will be able to link directly online to cited papers across
the entire DSDP and ODP series.

IODP welcomes scientific ocean drilling expedition and engineering
proposals from many disciplines, and from any country. With the newly
digitized ODP data resource available to them, scientists and engineers
writing new proposals will ultimately make new discoveries, develop new
technologies and contribute to greater scientific knowledge.

Information about the IODP proposal submission process is available at
http://www.iodp.org

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___________________________________________________________________

Prof. Norman MacLeod
Keeper of Palaeontology
The Natural History Museum
Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD

(0)207 942-5204 (Office)
(0)207 942-5546 (Fax)
http://www.nhm.ac.uk//research-curation/staff-directory/
palaeontology/cv-5463.html (Web Page)

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