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All findings and data published in volumes from the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) are now available at http://www.odplegacy.org (click on Samples, data & publications.) The second phase of the digitization project, to be completed by this fall, will bring the Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project series (Volumes 1-96) and other printed ODP and Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP) reports online. The DSDP publications will be available at http://www.deepseadrilling.org.
The Texas A&M Digital Library, which until recently operated under the universityıs vice president of research, produced more than 185,000 pages of digital files from original print publications in a joint venture with ODP. The U.S. National Science Foundation is funding the project
"This makes one of the great bodies of marine geologic literature easily accessible worldwide," said Dr. Mitchell Lyle, a professor in the Department of Oceanography at Texas A&M University.
ODP was a 20-year international partnership of scientists and research institutions organized to explore the evolution and structure of the Earth through scientific ocean drilling. ODP conducted drilling operations in the worldıs oceans from January 1985 through September 2003. The program succeeded DSDP, which began drilling operations in 1968 and concluded its explorations in 1983. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) has been building upon the legacy of success of both its predecessor programs since 2004.
James Allan, IODP program director at the U.S. National Science Foundation said, "NSF is delighted that these written results covering 35 years of scientific ocean drilling will be made easily available to the science community and society at large. We are very grateful for the efforts of the Texas A&M University Digital Library and Texas A&M University for serving as a partner in supporting this accomplishment, which provides many enhancements over the original printed versions.
The Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program includes an Initial Reports volume of shipboard reports for each ODP research cruise and a companion Scientific Results volume of peer-reviewed postcruise research results. ODP first began publishing its Proceedings online in 1997. Through the digitization effort, scanned versions of ODP Proceedings volumes originally published between 1986 and 1996 have been made Web-accessible.
The PDF chapter files generated through the digitization project started as scanned images of each original page. Through the use of an optical character recognition process, a searchable text layer was added to the PDF files, making it possible to copy and paste text from the final PDF file of each chapter. HTML volume tables of contents provide online navigation to individual chapter files. The digitized volumes include links to individual core photographs scanned from original film as part of a separate ODP legacy project.
Every chapter in both the Proceedings of the Ocean Drilling Program and the Initial Reports of the Deep Sea Drilling Project will have a digital object identifier (DOI) associated with it. Scholarly and professional publishers create links between reference lists and the online content of cited papers using DOIs. With information about DSDP and ODP publications deposited with the DOI registration agency CrossRef, publishers will be able to link directly online to cited papers across the entire DSDP and ODP series.
IODP welcomes scientific ocean drilling expedition and engineering proposals from many disciplines, and from any country. With the newly digitized ODP data resource available to them, scientists and engineers writing new proposals will ultimately make new discoveries, develop new technologies and contribute to greater scientific knowledge.
Information about the IODP proposal submission process is available at http://www.iodp.org