MOVING FROM AN ANALOG PAST TO A DIGITAL FUTURE: GEOSCIENCE DATA PRESERVATION AT THE WISCONSIN GEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY SURVEY

As an integral part of its statutory responsibilities, the Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey (WGNHS) has gathered, organized, studied, and maintained collections of representative geological samples from throughout Wisconsin. Currently, the collections comprise over 600,000 feet of drill core, more than 550,000 cuttings samples, approximately 51,000 hand specimens, and a variety of related materials.

The present and future value of these collections depends on their physical and digital preservation. More specifically, the collections' value is directly related to how carefully they are stored, documented, and inventoried, how easily they can be “discovered” by interested colleagues and customers, how logically they can be searched, and how efficiently items of interest can be retrieved. The WGNHS has recently acquired a new facility in which to house its physical collections. We have begun to catalog these collections in our enterprise database -- called WGNHS GEOBASE -- that uses Microsoft® SQL Server™.

Basic information (location, landowner, collar elevation, total depth, etc.) for all cores and cuttings held by the WGNHS has been entered into WGNHS GEOBASE and is accessible by means of a data viewer application called wiscLITH. We have also developed a mapping application that allows us to display, on a diagram of the storage facility, the location (row and shelf) of drill core from individual holes stored in that facility. We are in the process of adding the cuttings samples to this application.

A significant remaining challenge involves digitally capturing important analog information sets such as our hand specimen collection and related field notebooks. Existing digital data that still must be fully integrated into WGNHS GEOBASE include scanned images of more than 350,000 well construction reports (WCRs), data from approximately 300,000 additional WCRs that currently reside in a database maintained by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, geologic and geophysical logs, road materials files, and mine maps from southwest Wisconsin. We are also planning to move wiscLITH into a spatial environment, where it can serve as a graphical user interface to WGNHS GEOBASE and be added to the WGNHS website.