Metadata in a Digital Special Library: The Energy and Environmental Information Resources Center in Lafayette, Louisiana

This paper discusses three kinds of metadata and how they are used in the Energy & Environmental Information Resources Center (EE-IR Center), a digital special library of text, numeric, and geospatial data, located in Lafayette, Louisiana. These metadata are Dublin Core (DC), MARC21 (formerly USMARC), and Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) metadata. The EE-IR Center was formed as a partnership between the National Wetlands Research Center (NWRC) of the U.S. Geological Survey and the Center for Advanced Computer Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana (CACS/USL). Both partners are located in Lafayette, Louisiana. The EE-IR Center is funded by a grant from the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) of the U.S. Deptartment of Energy and is a participant in OCLC\u27s Cooperative Online Resource Catalog (CORC) project for the creation and sharing of metadata for Internet resources. The subject areas of the EE-IR Center are energy and the environment of Louisiana, especially in the wetlands areas of South Louisiana. An area of special interest is pollution and contamination in the Lower Mississippi Valley and offshore in the Gulf of Mexico. Other topics of interest include air and water quality, wetlands ecology, coastal zone management, oil and gas production and consumption, and economic indicators. Geospatial data sets include land use/land cover, hydrology, soils, habitats, political boundaries, and oil and gas well locations. The EE-IR Center\u27s home page is located at http://eeirc.nwrc.gov/ and its library catalog is located at http://eeirc.nwrc.gov/metadata.htm. Figure 1 is a .jpg image that exemplifies the kind of geospatial data set found in the catalog. Examples of a Web page, a digital document, and ther data sets in the EE-IR Center\u27s catalog are given in the final section of this paper