PANGAEA® - Publishing Network for Geoscientific and Environmental Data is a library for georeferenced data from the earth system, archived with related metainformation in a relational database and distributed via web services and accessible through various clients on the Internet. Data distribution and provision follows recent exchange standards as Dublin Core, OAI-PMH, XML and ISO19xxxx for the geoscientific metadata description. The content can be retrieved through library catalogs, search engines and portals. Data set descriptions include a bibliographic citation and are persistently identified using a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). A data warehouse functionality can be used to extract individual compilations from the inventory.PANGAEA is hosted by the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI), Bremerhaven and the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM), Bremen, Germany. The system is used by the World Data Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (WDC-MARE) as repository. Long-term archiving is assured through a contract with the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) and DataCite, the new international initiative to facilitate access to research data. Through a cooperation with the publisher Elsevier, data supplements in PANGAEA are automatically linked to publications in journals of the subject Earth and Planetary Sciences, served through ScienceDirect.