Founding of International Geo Sample Number organization

The founding assembly of the International Geo Sample Number organization (IGSN) signed the non-profit incorporation papers in San Francisco on Wednesday during the AGU meeting. [Right, founding members and other attendees at the signing. IGSN President Kerstin Lehnert is right of me in the photo. Photo credit, Lamont-Doherty]

The IGSN is 9-digit alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies non-biological samples from our natural environment and related sampling features.

The following founding members signed the statutes of the organization and elected its Executive Board:

• Arizona Geological Survey, USA
• Boise State University, USA
• City College of New York, USA
• Leibniz Institute for Ocean Sciences GEOMAR, Germany
• GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam, Germany
• Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, USA
• Oregon State University, USA
• Scripps Institution of Oceanography / UC San Diego, USA
• University of Minnesota, USA

Membership of the CSIRO-Australia, Geoscience Australia, and the US Geological Survey is pending and expected to be completed shortly.

AZGS, acting on behalf of the Association of American State Geologists (AASG) is working with the USGS to establish a US naming authority for IGSN under the auspices of the AASG-USGS US Geoscience Information Network (USGIN). This would provide the service to any earth science organizations that don't want to set up their own authority or have too few samples to justify the effort.

The USGS already has over 2 million items in their incipient ScienceBase catalog, 90% of which are from state geological surveys.