BENEFITS OF PAPERLESS, DIGITAL CORE DESCRIPTION

Eliminating traditional hand-written visual/initial core description sheets, and replacing them with a system that facilitates immediate digitization of descriptive comments, offers several distinct advantages. The describer's work becomes immediately and permanently available for sharing with collaborators both local and remote. This early and rapid exchange of work such as annotations, comments, photographs, and sketches can spur creative approaches to the work of deciphering sedimentary records. In its best form, an integrated, digital core description platform can bring together multiple core datasets, digital images, online connectivity with various databases and with collaborators working at disparate locations, and serve as a workspace for later analytical efforts far beyond the description phase. The Limnological Research Center (LRC) and LacCore (National Lacustrine Core Repository) have eliminated the paper step and experimented with several digital description platforms. In its most basic form, digital initial core description can consist of a station with a laptop/desktop computer running a word processor or spreadsheet; even this simple setup has proven to be preferable to handwritten sheets, which must be typed later for efficient sharing. An especially effective intermediate setup that has been the standard used at LRC/LacCore utilizes drawing software such as Adobe Illustrator, which allows the combination of images, graphs, text, and sketches to produce a PDF file that is readily moved across platforms without loss of information or compatibility problems. Developing standard formats, templates, and in-program shortcuts and macros greatly speeds the creation of these sheets. CoreWall (www.corewall.org) is a more ideal work environment that uses high-resolution digital core images as the anchor for all descriptions, display of datasets, stratigraphic correlation, and more. It pulls data from local or remote databases; it is connected to online resources, and is easily transferable among multiple collaborators. Descriptions are threaded and tied to users, so the progression of interpretation can be seen over time. Initial testing at LRC/LacCore has demonstrated the utility of the platform.