OPENING NEW HORIZONS USING AN ONLINE PETROLOGY CATALOG USING OMEKA

A digital, online catalog was created for the petrology teaching collection at State University of New York College at Geneseo using the web based, free and open source web-publishing platform Omeka. Omeka was chosen because of its flexibility and easily customized interface via source code edits, and because it has a lively community of users that discuss issues and help with solutions. The department’s collection contains approximately 1000 rock samples, some of which were purchased from private companies, while others were collected by members of the department. The predecessor of this online catalog is a physical catalog of notecards that allowed the user to search only by rock type or rock suite (rocks from a single geological region such as the Grand Canyon). Each rock now has a digital entry that can include the rock name, physical description, contributor, identification number, thin section details, suite information, geographical setting, and a picture of the physical sample. The online catalog has transformed the collection into a digital format making the collection far more accessible to faculty, students, and the public. The digital catalog is also more searchable, allowing users to search by any of the new data fields, including an interactive world map. The digital catalog allows for the linking of rocks to relevant online scientific literature, enabling users to learn more about the samples and the setting. The online catalog will increase the amount of data that can be stored in association with each sample and diversify the ways the petrological and geological data are presented to the user, improving and expanding the utility of the teaching collection.