ARIZONA GEOLOGICAL SURVEY MINING SITE – LEVERAGING 100 YEARS OF MINING REPORTS, MAPS AND PHOTOGRAPHS FOR THE NEXT 100 YEARS

In 2011, the Arizona Department of Mines and Minerals (ADMMR) was closed and the fate of 70 years worth of mining records was unsure, until the Arizona Geological Survey (AZGS) proposed to curate the materials. The AZGS, recognizing the wealth of information contained in thousands of exploration reports, began an ambitious digitization project aimed at greatly increasing free access to the mineral and geological information contained therein.

The AZGS began the Mining Preservation Project by first creating a high level inventory of the mining files previously held by the ADMMR. File-level inventories of the collections were created and published online through the AZGS Repository. The AZGS identified 30 distinct collections of mining records. The ADMMR created four sets of its own records, nearly 5,000 maps, over 4,400 property files, 700 publications and more than 6,000 photographs. It later received many donated collections: 5 photograph collections and 21 collections of exploration records from geologists. An initial survey of the holdings estimates the contents at 800,000 pages.

The AZGS had developed the infrastructure necessary to disseminate geoscience data in an interoperable framework called the U.S. Geoscience Information Network (USGIN). In order to conform to the USGIN standards of metadata interoperability, the materials had to be cataloged using the geographic metadata standard, ISO 19115. Required fields include a title, description, publication date, distributor contact, metadata contact, metadata date, and a link to the item. Additional recommended metadata for these files includes creator, thematic keywords, spatial keywords, etc.

Today, as metadata and digitization of each collection is completed, these documents are uploaded to an online search portal, mindata.azgs.az.gov, where researchers can find mine records by mine name, by spatial search on a map or by browsing a gallery of photographs from exploration reports.