On January 16, 1962, the National Oceanographic Data Center (NODC) celebrated its first anniversary after a full year of operation in its new quarters in Building 160 at the Naval Weapons Plant, Washington, D . C. The formal dedication of this new national facility in 1961 heralded the birth of a new concept in intragovernmental cooperation and a new concept in oceanography. The concept of a central location for the nation's oceanographic data had long been in the minds of many scientists and representatives of government since it was apparent that the tremendous volume of oceanographic data which had been collected and would be collected in the expansion of oceanographic effort might not be available to scientists. The lines of communication between individual laboratories, institutions, and government agencies which collect oceanographic data are extremely long, and therefore, data are not easily accessible. The value of data centers had already been demonstrated by the Weather Bureau's National Weather Records Center and the International Geophysical Year's World Data Centers A and B. However, the concept of a national oceanographic data center was entirely new; and so far as is known at the moment, there is no parallel organization in other nations of the world. The concept of national centers, however, is becoming more widespread; this concept was recently emphasized at the October 1961 meeting of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of the United Nations Educational and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). In a resolution passed by the Commission, a working group of the conference urged the establishment of ‘…national oceanographic data centers in order to facilitate the collection, processing, and exchange of oceanographic da