The "National Geothermal Data System" (NGDS) is being created by a consortium of federal, state, and academic institutions under the auspices of the Department of Energy to foster the growth of geothermal in the nation's energy portfolio. The "NGDS Network" is comprised of the NGDS-core at Boise State Univ., Energy Geosciences Institute (Univ. Utah), Great Basin Center for Geothermal Energy (Univ. Nevada, Reno), GeoHeat Center (Oregon Institute of Technology), Stanford Geothermal Program (Stanford Univ.), and the Geoscience Information Network (GIN, Arizona Geological Survey), USGS, BLM, Idaho Department of Water Resources, CoreWall (Univ. Minnesota), Geoinformatics for Geochemistry (GfG, LDEO, Columbia Univ.) and other partner, participating and affiliated databases. The NGDS is designed as a system for data acquisition, management and maintenance and for data access by a wide variety of users, including federal and state agencies, other databases, researchers, decision makers, the public, educational institutions, and the geothermal industry and financial institutions. It is a "federated network, that is comprised of several member networks and individual databases that share some level of trust, but member networks and databases retain their own administrative control. The Network will be linked by a set of standards, protocols and procedures and web services.

The identification and capture of relevant legacy data is a core operational goal of the NGDS. This process is initiated through the "NGDS Data Catalog". The Catalog will provide a mechanism for data discovery, for eliminating data duplication, and for cataloging digital and non-digital data legacy data. It will also help to set data digitization and uploading priorities for legacy data. The Catalog will be based on concepts developed by GIN. The Catalog must include the location, type, form, and description of the condition/state of existing non-digitized data (in particular those that may be deteriorating (cores, film, paper, non-digitized files, etc.)). The Catalog will have two fundamental branches, one for data that are already digital and the other for nondigital legacy data. Building and populating this Catalog is a major focus of this proposal and a major task for the NGDS.