SESAR is celebrating its 20th year in operation. Since SESAR’s inception in 2004, our users (you!) have registered >5 million samples! Our users are based in more than 64 countries and represent collections from international sample repositories, museum collections, and hundreds of individual researchers. SESAR’s success is only possible through your engagement with our community and services – thank you for supporting us! 

The SESAR team has been hard at work to envision and start implementing the next 20 years of SESAR. Based on input from our users, we have several changes planned that will improve SESAR’s future usability and sustainability. Notably: 

You may have noticed that SESAR is now SESAR2: the System for Earth and Extraterrestrial Sample Registration. This name change is in recognition of our on-going work to establish sample registration services for astromaterials in collaboration with the Astromaterials Data System.

We are in the process of updating and refreshing SESAR2’s user interfaces, including the SESAR2 Catalog Search and the sample registration tools in MySESAR. You will see new releases and requests for testing over the next 12 months.

We are updating SESAR2’s backend, including phasing out GeoPass login (replacing it with ORCID login), and migrating and updating the database to better support user needs and communities.

We are taking steps toward becoming a DataCite Service Provider. This will make it easier for organizations that are already DataCite members to register their samples with SESAR2. We are also considering becoming a DataCite Consortium Lead which will substantially reduce the fees for organizations to become a DataCite member as required to register large numbers of samples (>10,000/year). If you are interested in using SESAR2 to register samples for your whole organization, fill out this short form here so we can get in touch.

We will continue to update you as we make these changes, through newsletters, webinars and other community events. There will be multiple opportunities to give us feedback and even participate in user testing, so please keep an eye out for further updates.

Kerstin Lehnert, Project Director
Andrea Thomer, Product Manager
Sean Cao, System Engineer
Saebyul Choe, Data Curator
Juan David Figueroa, Application Developer
Natalie Raia, UX and Community Researcher
Stephen Richards, Technical Consultant
Dave Vieglais, Technical Consultant

SESAR Updates: July 2024

SESAR is kicking off fall with GSA in Pittsburgh, October 15 – 18th. Curators from SESAR and our partner systems, EarthChem Library, LEPR, and Astromat will be at booth #921 at the exhibitor showcase. 

We are also conducting short interviews during GSA 2023 to better understand how SESAR users (and potential SESAR users) work with samples 

Results from the interviews will inform immediate and long-term improvements to the search interfaces, data submission processes, usability, and interoperability of existing community-curated databases and repositories, and will guide development of resources and support for researchers.

Interviews are anticipated to last approximately 20 minutes and study participants will receive compensation for their time. We are interested in gathering data from as many disciplines and career stages as possible, and encourage students and early career researchers to participate. We are also interested in hearing from collections managers, those who have experience with multi-institutional collaborative grants involving sample collection and sharing, and analytical lab leadership.

Contact Dr. Natalie Raia at nraia@arizona.edu with questions or to schedule time to participate, and visit us at our booth (#921) at GSA! If you are unable to join us at GSA, please consider participating at AGU. We hope to see you there!

SESAR (IEDA2) Booth at GSA 2023

On May 23rd, we held a webinar hosted by the ESIP Physical Samples Cluster. At this webinar, we focused on the changes we have recently made to SESAR due to the ‘new IGSN’ and other ongoing developments, including the iSamples Project, that we plan to integrate. As part of this webinar, we also invited our users to partake in a short questionnaire to help us identify improvements and offer feedback on how to support our community better.

If you missed the webinar and want to watch the recording, please visit the ESIP YouTube page.

Help us improve SESAR by participating in our short questionnaire that is also available via the QR code at the end of the recording.

Recording of SESAR Presentation Hosted by ESIP

The Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) that has been developed and maintained by NOAA’s NCEI, has been decommissioned and will no longer be accessible on the NCEI web site starting May 5, 2025. In order to ensure continued access and updates to the IMLGS, SESAR and NCEI have agreed that SESAR will take over stewardship of this resource. SESAR staff is working with NCEI and the marine and lacustrine repository community to ensure persistence of this valuable resource. 

SESAR is planning a phased approach to continuing the services of the IMLGS: 

Phase Ia (completed December 1, 2025): Provide access to the current content of the IMLGS. SESAR will create a user interface for searching the current IMLGS and displaying search results. The priority is to make the contents of the IMLGS accessible again as quickly as possible and minimize downtime after the May 5 shutdown of NCEI-based Interactive Map Tool.

Phase Ib (completed February 10, 2026): SESAR has assumed management of the IMLGS Curators Listserv, previously hosted by NCEI. This listserv is an unmoderated forum for discussion and announcements related to the Curators group and Index to Marine and Lacustrine Geological Samples (IMLGS) database. To join the listserv, request to join here (log in to a Google email account first, or email info@geosamples.org to be manually added to the list): https://groups.google.com/a/geosamples.org/g/imlgs

Phase II (in progress, requires additional funding): Fully integrate the IMLGS services with SESAR. SESAR is starting to work with NCEI and contributing sample repositories to understand their needs and desires for a streamlined data ingest process and user needs for search. Based on these needs and desires, we will generate an implementation plan and try to identify sources of funding to perform the necessary technical developments.

Please note that much of the IMLGS data remains accessible also via GeoMapApp here.

We are grateful for the many notes of support we have received from the community reiterating the importance of the IMLGS resource and expressing gratitude to SESAR for helping to steward this resource in the future. We thank the community for your continued support and patience with this transition. 

If you have questions or comments, please reach out to us at info@geosamples.org.

Notice to the Community Regarding the IMLGS

We are excited to announce the release of our new “Teams” feature, live now in MySESAR. Teams allows multiple users to work on a shared platform within MySESAR, each utilizing their own individual account. This feature was designed to support groups that require multiple members to access and maintain shared sample metadata within their institution. We will be hosting two informational webinars on March 24th and April 3rd to introduce the Teams feature. To sign up, please see the links below:

March 24, 2025 at 11am ET: Register here

April 3, 2025 at 2pm ET: Register here

With the release of the Teams feature, the legacy GeoPass login system will now officially shut down on June 1, 2025. After June 1, 2025, SESAR will solely utilize ORCID validation for login and access to MySESAR. If you have not yet added your ORCID to your account, you can do this by following the steps outlined in our previous newsletter describing the GeoPass Phase out.

Our team is ready to support you during this transition, if you have any concerns or questions please email us at info@geosamples.org.

New Feature Release: Teams Functionality

The following message was sent to SESAR users who are not yet using ORCID to log in to their MySESAR accounts, in anticipation of the shutdown of the legacy IEDA2 GeoPass authentication system in 2025.

Dear SESAR2 GeoPass User,

This message is to inform you that SESAR2 is shutting down its GeoPass login system on January 1st, 2025. You are receiving this message because you have a GeoPass account currently registered with SESAR2. 

After January 1st, 2025, SESAR2 will solely utilize ORCID validation for login and access to MySESAR. ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a free, unique, persistent identifier for individuals. Usage of this internationally-recognized identifier and validation service makes our system safer and easier to access.

ACTION REQUIRED FROM YOU: To ensure undisrupted access and functionality to your SESAR2 account, please login to MySESAR via GeoPass and add your ORCID by December 31st, 2024. You can do this now by:

Registering for an ORCID if you do not have one: https://orcid.org/register

Logging into your SESAR account using GeoPass: https://geopass.iedadata.org/josso/

Under “MyAccount,” add your ORCID. This will allow you to “Login with your ORCID” once GeoPass is no longer available.


For our institutional and web services users, we understand this transition may bring changes that impact your workflow:


For institutional accounts using GeoPass, the primary SESAR2 user from the institution should link their ORCID to the institutional GeoPass. In the coming months we will make changes on the backend that will make it possible to create “Organizations” within SESAR2 and assign and/or transfer sample management permissions to multiple people.

Web Services registrations will begin incorporating ORCID authentication in the coming months. Access through GeoPass will no longer be available after January 1st, 2025.


We are dedicated to helping make this transition as smooth as possible for you. Please email us at info@geosamples.org with any questions or concerns.

Thank you!
The SESAR2 Team

sesar

SESAR (IEDA2) Booth at GSA 2023

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