Libraries and CIRES partner to transform 19th-Century tsunami records into open data | University Libraries | University of Colorado Boulder

"When Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) researchers digitized thousands of marigram charts, historic coastal water-level records dating back to the mid-1800s, they hoped the records could help to improve tsunami forecasting. These analog records often provide the only instrument-based evidence of past tsunami events, making them invaluable for scientific modeling....

But digitization alone wasn’t enough. The real challenge was converting thousands of scanned charts into structured, standardized data that could be shared through the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) database. That’s where the University Libraries was able to provide help through a collaborative research grant and the expertise of librarians."