Citing Virtual Collections of Data Session Presentation

 Collection level metadata is an invaluable technique to organize sprawling datasets, such as satellite missions that produce numerous granules.  In these an other cases, the granule metadata serve additional info needed process the data, but the search for data usually begins at the collection level.  A collection level catalog record documents many of the properties of the data that granules in the collection share in common.  

Virtual collections is a new concept for organizing and citing data, where the collection may be defined by any of the properties that the dataset granules share in common. All that is required is that the end user can execute a query based on harmonized parameters in a data repository, for example if a repository supports a project attribute in it's data catalog, all project data can be thought of as a virtual collection, because the collection only exists as a result of the catalog query.

This session is intended to inform decisions at federal repositories on how to implement digital object identifiers for research data.  We will explore how virtual collections may be a preferable option to dataset granule citation when 1) the repository doesn't have a stable representations of collections, and 2) the collections include many datasets that would make granule data citation cumbersome in a research publication.