MAPPING A NEW INFORMATION LANDSCAPE: LIBRARY/GEOLOGICAL SURVEY COLLABORATION IN GEOLOGICAL SURVEY AGENCY DATA STEWARDSHIP AND ACCESSIBILITY

Geoscience information is needed to inform issues related to energy, materials, water, and hazards, as well as preservation and appreciation of our natural heritage. Geological survey agencies are essential services with a jurisdiction-wide, long-term mandate to maintain, build, and make available needed public geoscience information. Surveys previously focused on mapping, research, and publication; while Libraries focused largely on acquisitions, holdings, and circulation. Currently, information science professionals at Libraries and geoscientists at Geological Surveys are both shifting to a focus on facilitation of access to digital information, opening collaborative opportunities.

The Minnesota Geological Survey (MGS) is among the one-third of US state geological surveys that are University-based, resulting in a natural partnership with the University Library. In past Library-Survey collaboration, all 45,000 pages and 650 maps published by MGS since 1872 were scanned and web-enabled in a Library-hosted institutional repository, along with GIS files. The entry points for publications' page and map content include not only keywords, authors, and titles, but also location, with spatial footprint visualizations against a map interface.

This work demonstrates that initial distinctions between the Survey’s publications, sample collections, datasets, and archives must be reimagined; all are now regarded as databases that can be queried and assigned georeferencing metadata and other common database protocols. We plan to migrate all Survey databases to Open Geospatial Consortium-compliant spatial web services, although effort will be needed to influence and accommodate data standards developed elsewhere. A renewed comprehensive database audit is underway to identify priorities for further database preparation in anticipation of common format and accessibility protocols.

Appreciation is expressed to our Library, Survey, and partner agency colleagues for their many roles in this activity.