The Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) hosts over 35 interns every summer at various institutions across the country in which they participate in one of three programs: ACCESS, SURE, or USEIT. The Undergraduate Studies in Earthquake Information Technology (USEIT) program has 19 interns who perform their research at the University of Southern California (USC). Working at USC offers the interns the honor of interacting with the director of SCEC, Dr. Thomas Jordan. Dr. Jordan’s extensive knowledge and experience provides the interns with valuable information in the field of seismology. Also, scientists such as Edward Field, James Dolan and Robert de Groot have worked hand-in-hand with the interns in an effort to be outstanding resources of information for the Grand Challenge.

After becoming acclimated to the software being used in USEIT, the interns were introduced to the Grand Challenge 2008. In order to complete the Grand Challenge 2008 successfully, the collaboration of four groups was necessary: the software developers group, the SCEC-Virtual Display of Objects (VDO) animation group, the filming and documentation group, and the Digital Library group. The Digital Library group had the task of archiving all documents, data tables, images, software, etc. related to the Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERF), Version 2 report.

The Digital Library has been created in an effort by the SCEC community to make all of the items related to the UCERF report accessible to the public and to preserve the data from the UCERF report in the USC Digital Library. This has been a new experience for SCEC, and the Digital Library group has served as a stepping stone for future SCEC interns. The group consisted of 6 members: Christiann Boutwell, Emerzon Cruz, Alfredo Gonzalez, Georgia Looney, Brittney Miller, and Michael Pratts. For many of the interns, the process of archiving assets of the UCERF report provided exposure to a different aspect of the Digital Library. An asset is a document or item that is to be digitally archived in one or many formats and is described by a metadata record. A metadata record is a brief overview that includes such information as a title, a short description, the author(s) name(s), keywords, and the date of creation. Metadata records were created by the Digital Library group for the UCERF main report, its appendices, tabular datasets, images, the SCEC-VDO software, the SCEC-VDO plug-ins, etc. Well over 100 metadata records relating to the UCERF report were created during the summer of 2008.

Although metadata records are entered on an interface through the USC Libraries, the Digital Library group gathered much of the information needed for metadata records and entered it in a template created by Gonzalez and Miller for their preliminary stages of review. To ensure that each asset was accurately represented by its metadata record, the members of the Digital Library group internally reviewed the content of each metadata record and made revisions as necessary. However, to ensure the integrity of the created metadata records, the Digital Library group collaborated with the authors of the assets, as well as other individuals immediately available in the SCEC community. Along with support of Wayne Shoaf, a USC librarian and metadata specialist, and Tran Huynh, a SCEC administrator, the Digital Library group was successfully able to communicate the UCERF report through a digital archive for SCEC.