The Ministry for Primary Industries in New Zealand owns (on behalf of the Government) a large amount of data that describes New Zealand's marine fisheries and biodiversity. The most common examples of such data include electronic databases, paper forms, whole specimens and ageing specimens - mainly otoliths.
MARLIN is a metadata database documenting the scientific data owned by the Ministry. MARLIN is intended to provide scientists with a catalogue of the Ministry's scientific data holdings. Currently MARLIN does not enable the downloading of source data (although this is a planned future enhancement), however MARLIN does provide details of where requests for access to the Ministry's scientific data should be directed to.
MARLIN does not contain a catalogue of scientific reports or publications describing New Zealand's marine fisheries and biodiversity. Suggested places to begin looking for information on reports and publications include the Ministry for Primary Industries website http://www.mpi.govt.nz, and the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric (NIWA) research's library http://library.niwa.co.nz. (You may be required to register for this service) This site provides search access to online library databases with over 130,000 records. About 85,000 of these records are the SIRIS database, and includes indexed papers by authors from NIWA and predecessor organisations. That includes all the Fisheries Assessment Reports (FARs), Fishery Assessment Research Documents (FARDs) and other MAFFish series. Final research reports, which are unpublished documents, are not included.