The NIST Public Data Repository (PDR) is a key part of NIST research data infrastructure supporting public search and access to a multi-disciplinary growing collection of NIST public data. The repository fosters FAIR reproducibility, interoperability and discovery of scientific, engineering and technical information in service of the NIST mission.

The PDR is designed as a trusted repository, one which complies with long term data preservation and publication standards. It is built using community open source software (See Github repository for more details). Each record has a persistent identifier, and may be viewed on a unique web “landing page” which includes user-friendly and readable views of key metadata, high level terms which detail the nature of the record dataset. Additionally the PDR landing page provides access to Download public data files and citation (See NIST Fair Use Policy and Citation).

The NIST PDR provides the following capabilities:

  • Search and Navigation for NIST public datasets
  • Citation for data with persistent Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs)
  • Find related data publications
  • Access to Download data files
  • Interoperability through machine readable standard data format and protocol
  • Long term digital preservation

The top right banner “Search” navigates to the NIST Science Data Portal where users may discover data of interest and perform advanced queries. Each PDR record includes descriptive information (metadata) about a public data resource and is also an entry in the NIST bureau Enterprise Data Inventory. Records may be searched via the API, and are also available in a machine-readible standard open data format and are compliant with Federal Data resource guidance .