Atmospheric science librarians require access to many tools to assist patrons in their research. There are databases for locating journal articles, dissertation theses, patents, gray literature, etc. However, resources for finding available data sets are not as prevalent. Authors will rarely mention data sets used in their research papers and searching the internet may not find the relevant data sets. Outside of the "invisible college", where do researchers find data that may already exist?

NASA's Global Change Master Directory (GCMD), a Web-based information system for global change research, provides the tools to locate datasets by selecting keywords from a controlled vocabulary of over 1200 terms or through free-text searching. Over 15,000 data set descriptions or metadata (16% related to atmospheric sciences) are available in the GCMD from collaborative partners including federal agencies, research institutes, universities, and international partners. This presentation will demonstrate some of the features of the GCMD including search and retrieval of data set information, direct access to data sets, controlled vocabularies, and tools to create your own metadata for specialized data set collections held at research libraries.