This report was part of Lehman's work towards a MLIS degree at the Information School, University of Washington.
The project team surveyed and interviewed forty identified experts within the diverse tsunami community. The survey revealed that this community is a sophisticated user of Internet search engines and tools and is very familiar with existing information. The sites mentioned most frequently as being helpful were those of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as well as the International Tsunami Information Center and the National Earthquake Information Center. The primary criticism of other sites is that many of these sites are difficult to utilize. The survey results list uneven organization, dead links, and poor quality information as part of these difficulties. From the results, this community is looking for a centralized means to find and retrieve realtime as well as historical data, geographic resources, outreach materials, and modeling information. The data demonstrate a clear need for more coherent and effective access to tsunami information such as could be found in a Tsunami Digital Library.
The following report describes the concept of the TDL, its technical framework and proposed content. We explain the methodology of the needs assessment, report the results of our survey, and recommend further work.