LOCALITY DATABASE FOR MUSEUM OF GEOLOGY PALEONTOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS

The Museum of Geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology houses an estimated 300,000 specimens. The locality information for these collections runs the gamut from township-range notations in field notebooks and index cards to precisely positioned UTM coordinates in a spreadsheet. A single, searchable locality database accessible to research staff and visiting scientists is sorely needed, but has never been developed. Students are designing a locality database for the Museum, implemented as a geodatabase within a Geographic Information System (GIS). The combination of a potentially large spatial extent covering multiple states with the need for highly precise locations presents an exceptional design challenge, as does the sensitive nature of the information being archived. The students will design a pilot database for a smaller area encompassing several counties while designing for a much larger area for eventual implementation. Because much of the locality data were collected before the advent of GPS, base layers needed to correctly locate a specimen based on sometimes scanty information will be included, such as township/range, hydrology, towns, roads, and digital orthophotoquads. The students will test the database using a small selection of localities in a restricted location but covering a time span of many years, in preparation for a major effort to implement the entire database.