Shining a Light on Scientific Data: Building a Data Catalog to Foster Data Sharing and Reuse, by Ian Lamb and Catherine Larson. Code{4}Lib Journal, Issue 32, 2016-04-25.

“The scientific community’s growing eagerness to make research data available to the public provides libraries — with our expertise in metadata and discovery — an interesting new opportunity. This paper details the in-house creation of a “data catalog” which describes datasets ranging from population-level studies like the US Census to small, specialized datasets created by researchers at our own institution. Based on Symfony2 and Solr, the data catalog provides a powerful search interface to help researchers locate the data that can help them, and an administrative interface so librarians can add, edit, and manage metadata elements at will. This paper will outline the successes, failures, and total redos that culminated in the current manifestation of our data catalog.”