Appendix A: Site Visit Guidelines Pre-review Questions from the CGED
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QUESTIONS ABOUT ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE
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What are the goals and objectives of the center? What are its responsibilities?
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Who provides resources and what is their historical profile?
What criteria are used to allocate funding to the center?
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What is the organizational structure of the center?
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How does the center report to its upper management?
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What is the relationship between the organizational structure and the goals and objectives outlined above?
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What activities are being given priority by the center at the present time?
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What activities are on hold for various reasons?
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How are priorities set to keep tasks within resources?
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What does the center think is the opinion of the user community about itself and its effectiveness?
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What is the formal relationship between the center and NOAA?
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QUESTIONS ABOUT USER RELATIONS AND EDUCATION
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What procedures are used to make potential users aware of the availability of data sets at the center?
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How does the center educate the user community about its existence and procedures?
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How does the center poll the opinion of its user community?
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What are the existing mechanisms for review?
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What is the center doing to improve user abilities to submit to or acquire data from the center?
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How does the center obtain information about the types of data, formats of data, models or software tools that the user community expects it to provide?
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QUESTIONS ABOUT DATA TYPES AND QUANTITY
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What scientific disciplines is the center obligated to support?
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What forms of media must the center deal with?
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What is the extent of the current data inventory by media type, by discipline?
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What is currently known about probable changes in these numbers?
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What are the present limits of available storage for different media at the center?
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Are there procedures in place to enhance the longevity of the archived data?
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QUESTIONS ABOUT DATA ACQUISITION PROCEDURES
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What is the center charter responsibility for acquiring data?
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What rules, priorities and technical considerations govern data acquisition?
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At what rate and in what quantity does data come?
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Does the center play an active role in promoting and facilitating the submission of data?
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What procedure is followed in making a data set a permanent holding of the center?
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How is documentation, validation and quality control of the submitted data set carried out?
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How are the data cataloged, described, inventoried?
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QUESTIONS ABOUT DATA TRANSFORMATIONS
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What facilities exist for transforming input media to more compact and more accessible storage forms?
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Are data ever reformatted before storage? What policies govern this activity?
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What derived data sets are generated by the center?
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What facilities exist for user requested modifications of data sets prior to delivery?
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QUESTIONS ABOUT REQUESTS AND DISTRIBUTION
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How do potential customers contact the center?
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How are data requests logged and what system is used to assure timely response.
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What is the number and types of data requests coming to the center?
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What means are being used to satisfy these requests?
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Who are the customers (i.e., institutional affiliation, disciplinary affiliation, # of user requests, # of requests per user, etc.).
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What are the users' costs (or rights when free) for acquiring data?
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QUESTIONS ABOUT STANDARDS
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What standards guide the center in various areas? How are these related to what is happening in subdisciplines and industry?
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How does the center become aware of standards and make choices among conflicting options?
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What role does the center play in creating standards?
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What are the current limitations regarding network accessibility and what is planned for the future? How are limited resources (i.e., tempdisks, etc.) allocated?
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QUESTIONS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY
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What hardware does the center currently have to support its activities?
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How adequate is this hardware?
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What additions are planned?
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QUESTIONS ABOUT SOFTWARE
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What software packages and systems does the center routinely use?
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What is their origin--University, Commercial, NOAA Internal?
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What software systems form part of the data holdings for dissemination?
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What is the center doing to improve communication between itself and other centers as well as with users?
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What does the user community think of the data formats, software standards, software products, provided by the center?
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What does the center do to reduce duplication of effort in the community with regard to frequently used software modules such as format access, coordinate transformation, time routines?
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MISCELLANEOUS
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What does the center expect its role to be in the global change research program?
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What are the relationships between the center and other international data centers? How can these be strengthened, if necessary?
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How does the center control costs with respect to user requests? Are charges standardized or are they user (uses) dependent?
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Are any of the center services contracted out to private industry or to universities?
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What are the 5-year plans in each of the area addresses by the review questions?
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