“What's in It for You?”: Preserving Data at NCEI

An archive has to balance keeping everything with keeping what it can actually preserve faithfully and conscientiously. There are many educational resources and schools of thought out there to help archives determine how best to do this. But there’s nothing like experience. After centuries, the archives have learned a little something to help make their lives and thus scientist’s lives a little easier. For example, we catalog things now, we use databases, we make sure there’s a little explanation that accompanies the data. However, none of this came out of nowhere, and the most incredible items we have in our archives are not theorized by archivists. This talk will explore why Preserving data with NCEI can be daunting but also a huge boon to anyone who wants to use (or for that remember) what was submitted to the Archive.