The Cornell University Library was invited in late 2012 to participate with the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) here at Cornell and several outside partners to propose implementation of a Climate Change Science Clearinghouse for New York State(NYCCSC), funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, or NYSERDA. The NYCCSC "will compile and coordinate scientific data and literature that will assist New York State in achieving its climate change adaptation and mitigation goals by providing user-friendly, web-based public access to data and literature related to climate change science that is relevant to New York State. The NYCCSC will also serve as an academic climate change data and literature clearinghouse that will support climate change research activities of state agencies, authorities, municipalities, private business and the insurance industry.”

Our successful proposal has now reached beta release status in the second year of a three-year project, and members of the Library and NRCC team will describe our approach to realizing the ambitious goals for the Clearinghouse, demonstrate progress so far, and focus on the extensive metadata work involved in finding, cataloging, and inter-relating diverse content into a coherent user experience. We will discuss extensions to the VIVO ontology to encompass new concepts and relationships inherent in climate change science, present a novel integration of VIVO as a semantic back end to the Blacklight faceted search interface, and describe how the Clearinghouse leverages a spatial database to improve relevance ranking of documents, data, and maps based on a user’s selected geographic scope of interest.