MINUTES

Curators of Marine Geological Samples Meeting
5-7 October 1998
Hosted by the Ocean Drilling Program
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

Minutes compiled by Paula Worstell, SIO

MEETING SUMMARY

The Curators of Marine Geological Samples group convened at the Ocean Drilling Program offices at Texas A&M University, 5-7 October 1998. Seventeen core curators, representing 10 facilities in the US, UK and Germany (ODP repositories counted as separate facilities) and the US National Geophysical Data Center/World Data Center for Geophysics & Marine Geology, Boulder attended. John Firth, ODP Curator, hosted the meeting and Carla Moore, NGDC, acted as meeting chair.

Presentations and discussions included overviews of curatorial facilities, non-destructive core-logging systems, the Index to Marine Geological Samples database, limnogeology and related curatorial issues, and improvements to core-describing procedures.

Some common themes in the discussions included the need to develop standards, to increase general awareness of the collections and their value, how to increase the "visibility" of the collections among funding agencies, and reinforcement of cooperative programs in data and collections management.

NEXT MEETING

The next meeting of the Curators of Marine Geological Samples will be in September 1999, hosted by Alan Mix, Curator of the Marine Geology Repository at Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon (Nick Pisias volunteered OSU to host the meeting and confirmation of the meeting's location and exact time is pending concurrence by Alan Mix).