Creating And Using A Glacier Authority Index To Document Climate Change

Authority lists or indices are key components of cataloging and metadata work as they provide critical anchoring points to disambiguate between various entities. This article describes the creation of a glacier index at the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Snow and Ice Data Center which required synthesizing various data sources into a comprehensive list. This paper explores the background of this project, criteria used to justify the creation of the index, the complications inherent in creating a data source for two different types of memory institutions, publishing that data in Wikidata, and the impacts the index has for describing aspects of climate change.