ABSTRACT
Global environmental change is a complex issue requiring observations and data from many different Earth science disciplines. The Earth science community has made a vast amount of data and information widely available on the Internet for global change research. However, while there are many tools for locating global change literature, there are relatively few tools to aid librarians, researchers and others in locating global change data. The NASA Global Change Master Directory (GCMD) (https://gcmd.nasa.gov" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://gcmd.nasa.gov) is a dynamic multidisciplinary information retrieval system consisting of metadata records that describe Earth science data sets, where data are located, and how to obtain the data. This article describes the role of the GCMD in locating and accessing global change data, the structure of 22metadata describing the data, the development of controlled vocabularies to search for data, and the implementation of interfaces for the retrieval of global change data set information. The GCMD, as a catalog of global change data, provides librarians and researchers a tool to meet the global change data and information needs of the user community. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <docdelivery@haworthpress.com> Website: <https://www.HaworthPress.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.HaworthPress.com> ©2003 by TheHaworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]
