Representatives from the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MCM), Jornada (JRN), and Luquillo (LUQ) Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) programs were amongst thousands of Information Technology (IT) professionals attending the annual DrupalCon meeting in Austin, Texas, from June 2 - 6, 2014. The meeting featured plenary sessions by numerous IT teams, including those from the White House, weather.com, MSNBC, Time.inc, and others. Participants from 60 countries had opportunity to watch live the LTER sponsored session, “DEIMS, a Drupal profile for ecological data," which was one of 14 use-case plenaries selected from among 342 proposed sessions. DEIMS, the Drupal Environmental Information Management System, consists of a user-friendly metadata editor coupled with the functionality to easily construct tools for data discovery, display and download.
At the meeting, LTER Information Managers networked with Drupal’s finest, and learned firsthand the latest IT advances doing the rounds in this vibrant and diverse open source community. DEIMS resolve is to develop further a unified site-based solution to manage all things information: from data to synthesized forms of knowledge, whether publications, datasets, projects and their graphical representations.