Some methods used by 21 USA-LTER sites on their Intranet and on the WWW for data management
By: Eda C. Melendez-Colom, LUQ

SITES INLUDED IN THIS SURVEY:
AND , ARC , BES , BNZ , CDR , CAP , CWT , HFR , HBR , JRN , KBS , KNZ , LUQ , MCM , NTL , NWT , PAL , PIE , Sevilleta , SGS , VCR

INTRODUCTION:
Visiting a Web site is not enough to learn about a site's Information Management (IM) system. The generalizations that could be made herewith would be based solely on the information I was able to find by browsing the Web sites. Although I spent at least 45 minutes on each site, I could have missed some of the information that is actually there. Before making this public, I will make sure that all sites give me their updates to this survey. After all, we have been trained to see the Web site, at least I have learned it that way, as a media to share data and information. I was not aware until now, that it is also a way in which other people would judge what IM is doing at our site in terms of the in-house services that we are actually providing our researchers with.

PURPOSE OF THIS SURVEY:
To learn from other sites how they manage their data on their local area network (Intranet) and/or on their Web site, and to find out the role that their Web sites (Internet) play in the common data management tasks of data sharing, documentation of the data, and data cataloguing.

A DEFINITION FOR A " common management framework ":
The exercise of doing this survey and the answers that I got from some of you allowed me to finally understand what someone meant with this phrase. I prepared a list of all the concepts that this phrase involves in this document. Although it just relates to our every day life tasks and responsibilities, it is amazing the trouble it cause you if you forget to describe how your system provides this to the investigator at the site level. For this reason I want to share it with you, and with all the future LTER sites.