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Upgrading the Oregon Coastal Atlas for regional data discoveryTanya C. Haddad 1 , Andy S. Lanier 2 & Todd R. Hallenback 31 Oregon Coastal Management Program, Department of Land Conservation and Development, Portland, OR, USAtanya.haddad@state.or.us2 Oregon Coastal Management Program, Department of Land Conservation and Development, Salem, OR, USA3 West Coast Governors Alliance on Ocean Health, Office of the Governor, Salem, OR, USAAbstractThe Oregon Coastal Atlas (http://www.coastalatlas.net) has been working to convert its searchable simple catalogarchive of data records into a more robust standards-based catalog. The goal of this conversion is to improve utilityof the archive on multiple levels: to enable remote searching of records by external atlases, to improve search resultrelevance for atlas customers, and to enable direct connection to data services from search results. This project hasmultiple phases: adoption of a catalog engine that supports the Catalog Services for the Web (CSW) standard, indexingof complete metadata records rather than select discovery metadata fields, and upgrading of metadata recordsfrom the older FGDC CSDGM standard to the newer ISO 19139 formats. Each of these phases has entailed muchresearch and testing, and many lessons have been learned along the way.IntroductionThe Oregon Coastal Atlas (OCA) is a multi-group project established by a partnership between the OregonCoastal Management Program (OCMP), Oregon State University (OSU) Department of Geosciences, and Ecotrust,a non-governmental organization based in Portland, Oregon. As a relatively mature Coastal Web Atlas (CWA) theOregon Coastal Atlas project has encountered and overcome many technical and institutional challenges and hasincorporated many lessons learned over time into its current design and approach (Haddad et al., 2011).In 2012 the OCA celebrated its 10-year anniversary on the web. As web projects go, it has been a relatively stableproject over time, undergoing major back-end upgrades twice during its lifetime, but maintaining essentially thesame chief public facing functions. These major functional areas are represented by the four main tabs in the OCAinterface: Maps, Tools, Learn, and Search. Each of these areas of the web site enables users to: browse and makemaps of coastal areas, find and utilize analysis tools designed to help solve coastal problems, learn about coastalgeographies and topics, and search for and find geospatial data about the Oregon coast. Of these functional areas, the“Search” portion of the OCA is the oldest and least changed, reflecting origins that date to the genesis of the project.While the existing searchable archive and simple catalog interface has proved durable and functional, it has, allalong, had limitations. Recent developments in the west coast region have suggested new ways in which OCA dataholdings could be shared with a wider audience. As stewards of the project look at the architectural upgrades necessaryto keep the Atlas relevant into its next phase of life, improving many aspects of the search function are high onthe list of necessary and desired improvements.BackgroundWhen the OCA project team was initially assembled in the year 2000, a primary motivation for the project at thattime was to improve the sorry state of discovery for any digital geospatial products produced by the various programsof the OCMP. The situation was relatively dire: valuable data which had been gathered with tax-payer dollarssat mostly unused by anyone who could not be in close physical proximity to the dusty file folders and aging digitalmedia shelves which housed the data. Managers could see that as hardware and file formats evolved it was becomingdifficult for even OCMP staff to access the digital files due to lack of appropriate media drives and softwareplatforms. As the OCA project got underway, this became the primary priority: to halt the technological obsolescenceof the information by bringing data forward into modern file formats and storing it in a secure server setting,and to make it accessible to a broad audience via the web.Ultimately, this goal was achieved by manually compiling basic discovery metadata on approximately 300 geospatialdata sets into a simple database, and building a primitive search page to allow searching of the database fields165