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Analog archival data can supplement modern digital research, but only if those data are preserved, described, and migrated to appropriate formats. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU) is responsible for managing, archiving, and disseminating cryospheric and polar data. The clear majority of these data are digital, but the NSIDC also houses a collection of historical archival materials that include measurements related to the earth's glaciated regions prior to the development of modern instrumentation. Their formats, however, are not conducive to contemporary analysis, rendering them ostensibly “lost” to research. This paper describes a series of efforts to provide access to these collections that date back to their original acquisition, as long ago as the mid-nineteenth century, with focus primarily on activities over the last 15 years. The most recent effort was funded by the Council on Library & Information Resources and won the 2016 International Data Rescue Award. The intent is to highlight key challenges, and our proposed own solutions to those challenges, in designing a digitization project centered on providing online access to analog data in glaciological, geomorphological, and related research.

This project compiled 463,530 instrumental observations of daily temperature, precipitation and sunshine at up to 319 stations in China between 1912 and 1951. The principal sources are monthly reports of the Institute of Meteorology, Nanjing, observatories in Japanese‐occupied Manchuria, and the Japanese Army in North China. Gross errors, rounding errors and inhomogeneities are identified. The new dataset is temporally and spatially consistent with existing datasets of monthly temperature, but reports higher precipitation and sunshine.

Turning historical meteorological observations into usable data is a challenging process that is immeasurably enriched when it encompasses interdisciplinarity. Here, the McGill DRAW (Data Rescue: Archives and Weather) project shows how climatologists, geographers, archivists, data scientists, and coders together built a citizen-science-based transcription platform to transform the McGill Observatory paper records into a traceable and sustainable database.

The changes which are brought about by natural evolution often have very long time-constants, and the data which are needed to capture and measure them can therefore span many decades, sometimes centuries. Most of the natural sciences have caches of analogue historical data that would add significantly to our understanding of the evolution of the objects in question, if only the information in those data were readily accessible in modern electronic formats. Unfortunately, many of those analogue data are in precarious physical condition and only very few have been digitized. We review briefly the global situation regarding the status of those “data at risk”, and suggest strategies that will ensure the preservation of the information that they contain, making it readily and easily accessible in the public domain for use in specific scientific research, disaster risk assessment, or citizen science projects.

GeoResJ 6, 202-212 (2015). doi:10.1016/j.grj.2015.04.001 special issue: "Rescuing Legacy Data for Future Science / Edited by Kerstin Lehnert, Leslie Hsu, Mark A. Parsons and Lesley Wyborn", Published by Elsevier, Amsterdam [u.a.]

Scientific ocean drilling began in 1968 and ever since has been generating huge amounts of data, including that from shipboard analysis of cores, in situ borehole measurements, long-term subseafloor hydrogeological observatories, and post-expedition research done on core samples and data at laboratories around the world (Smith et al., 2010). Much of the data collected aboard the drilling vessels are captured in a number of program databases (e.g., Janus), and eventually archived in a long-term data repository. However, data resulting from researchers’ analyses on core samples in the post-cruise period are generally confined to journal articles and scholarly literature or, particularly for raw or processed data sets, to the hard drives of those researchers. Thus, knowledge of and access to long tail research data that constitutes a significant portion of the overall output of scientific ocean drilling is at risk of remaining lost to the multidisciplinary Earth sciences community. In order to address the issue of long tail data from scientific ocean drilling, the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Management International (IODP-MI) partnered with the data publisher PANGAEA hosted by the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and the University of Bremen Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM) to conduct a post-cruise data rescue project. This collaboration began in 2007 and continued until 2013. This report summarizes the goals, methods, results, and lessons learned from the IODP Post-Cruise Data Capture Project.

This paper considers legacy data and data rescue within the context of geomorphology. Data rescue may be necessary dependent upon the storage medium (is it physically accessible) and the data format (e.g. digital file type); where either of these is not functional, intervention will be required in order to retrieve the stored data. Within geomorphological research, there are three scenarios that may utilize legacy data: to reinvestigate phenomena, to access information about a landform/process that no longer exists, and to investigate temporal change. Here, we present three case studies with discussion that illustrate these scenarios: striae records of Ireland were used to produce a palaeoglacial reconstruction, geomorphological mapping was used to compile a map of glacial landforms, and aerial photographs were used to analyze temporal change in river channel form and catchment land cover.

Myriad environmental satellite missions are currently orbiting the earth. The comprehensive monitoring by these sensors provide scientists, policymakers, and the public critical information on the earth’s weather and climate system. The state of the art technology of our satellite monitoring system is the legacy of the first environment satellites, the Nimbus systems launched by NASA in the mid-1960s. Such early data can extend our climate record and provide important context in longer-term climate changes. However, the data was stowed away and, over the years, largely forgotten. It was nearly lost before its value was recognized and attempts to recover the data were undertaken. This paper covers what it took the authors to recover, navigate and reprocess the data into modern formats so that it could be used as a part of the satellite climate record. The procedures to recover the Nimbus data, from both film and tape, could be used by other data rescue projects, however the algorithms presented will tend to be Nimbus specific. Data rescue projects are often both difficult and time consuming but the data they bring back to the science community makes these efforts worthwhile.

Earth Observation data acquired by the Landsat missions are of immense value to the global community and constitute the world’s longest continuous civilian Earth Observation program. However, because of the costs of data storage infrastructure these data have traditionally been stored in raw form on tape storage infrastructures which introduces a data retrieval and processing overhead that limits the efficiency of use of this data. As a consequence these data have become ‘dark data’ with only limited use in a piece-meal and labor intensive manner. The Unlocking the Landsat Archive project was set up in 2011 to address this issue and to help realize the true value and potential of these data. The key outcome of the project was the migration of the raw Landsat data that was housed in tape archives at Geoscience Australia to High Performance Data facilities hosted by the National Computational Infrastructure (a super computer facility located at the Australian National University). Once this migration was completed the data were calibrated to produce a living and accessible archive of sensor and scene independent data products derived from Landsat-5 and Landsat-7 data for the period 1998–2012. The calibrated data were organized into High Performance Data structures, underpinned by ISO/OGC standards and web services, which have opened up a vast range of opportunities to efficiently apply these data to applications across multiple scientific domains.

The Global Sea Level Observing System (GLOSS) Group of Experts (GE) data archaeology group is collating tools and producing guidelines for historic sea level data. They aim to aid the discovery, scanning, digitising and quality control of analogue tide gauge charts and sea level ledgers. Their goal is to improve the quality, quantity and availability of long-term sea level data series. This paper examines different tools for the automatic digitisation of tide gauge charts, the methods available for transcribing handwritten tide gauge ledgers and possible future developments that might speed up and partially automate these processes.

The youth of seismology as a science, compared to the typical duration of seismic cycles, results in a relative scarcity of records of large earthquakes available for processing by modern analytical techniques, which in turn makes archived datasets of historical seismograms extremely valuable in order to enhance our understanding of the occurrence of large, destructive earthquakes. Unfortunately, the value of these datasets is not always perceived adequately by decision-making administrators, which has resulted in the destruction (or last-minute salvage) of irreplaceable datasets. We present a quick review of the nature of the datasets of seismological archives, and of specific algorithms allowing their use for the modern retrieval of the source characteristics of the relevant earthquakes. We then describe protocols for the transfer of analog datasets to digital support, including by contact-less photography when the poor physical state of the records prevents the use of mechanical scanners. Finally, we give some worldwide examples of existing collections, and of successful programs of digital archiving of these valuable datasets.

Large amounts of vintage seismic data were rescued and disseminated in an internal project of the Istituto Nazionale di Oceanografia e di Geofisica Sperimentale (OGS). Such types of data would be very difficult to acquire today because they cover many areas that are currently subject to restrictions in obtaining exploration permits. The datasets extend over large geographical areas, covering large geological structures and would be very expensive to acquire today. Additionally, these data are particularly interesting because they were acquired using a high-energy source (dynamite) that would be difficult to obtain permission to use today. Therefore the recovery of these data could be very interesting for both the scientific and commercial communities. The urgency of rescuing tapes before degradation, and scanning and converting the paper sections into a usable form was the main focus, but, at the same time, the project looked ahead and attempted to address possible future exploitation of these data. To this end, considering how end users are likely to search for and use data, a full processing path that goes beyond recovery to consider other aspects was developed. The other concerns integrated into this process are • data enhancement, to overcome data limitations due to the older technology used during acquisition; • data integration, to consolidate different data types within the same data space, and • data discovery, for which a specific web based framework named SNAP (Seismic data Network Access Point) was developed that allows end users to search, locate and preview the data.

What is the value of ‘old’ data when much more sophisticated data are being acquired today in huge quantities with modern equipment and served up in ready-to-use form? Why the hype over delving into the past, when the observers were undoubtedly less well informed than they are today? What can such old records possibly teach us that we don’t already know better from modern electronic data and today’s sophisticated experiments? As this paper demonstrates, the answers to those questions lie in the critical scientific advantages of the long-term date-stamps which only historical data carry.

Over the course of a scientific career, a large fraction of the data collected by scientific investigators turns into data at risk of becoming inaccessible to future science. Although a part of the investigators’ data is made available in manuscripts and databases, other data may remain unpublished, non-digital, on degrading or near obsolete digital media, or inadequately documented for reuse. In 2013, Integrated Earth Data Applications (IEDA) provided data rescue mini-awards to three Earth science investigators. IEDA’s user communities in geochemistry, petrology, geochronology, and marine geophysics collect long-tail data, defined as data produced by individuals and small teams for specific projects, tending to be of small volume and initially for use only by these teams, thus being less likely to be easily transferred or reused. Long-tail data are at greater risk of omission from the scientific record. The awarded projects topics were (1) Geochemical and Geochronological data on volcanic rocks from the Fiji, Izu-Bonin-Mariana arc, and Endeavor segments of the global mid-ocean ridge, (2) High-Resolution, Near-bottom Magnetic Field Data, and (3) Geochemistry of Lunar Glasses. IEDA worked closely with the awardees to create a plan for the data rescue, resulting in the registration of hundreds of samples and the entry of dozens of data and documentation files into IEDA data systems. The data were made openly accessible and citable by assigning persistent identifiers for samples and files. The mini-award program proved that a relatively small incentive combined with data facility guidance can motivate investigators to accomplish significant data rescue.

Adopting standards for data and metadata collection is necessary for success of data rescue and preservation initiatives. Physical sample data and metadata rescue and preservation can be particularly challenging in that much of the available information may not be readily digitized or machine-readable. Making the legacy data rescue and preservation process as simple as possible through the development of template workflows can enable wider adoption of standards by personnel. Template workflows also simplify training of additional personnel to assist in the registration process.