BUILDING A DIGITAL QUARRY FOR DINOSAUR NATIONAL MONUMENT

The Digital Quarry Project is an effort to bring the wall of fossils at Dinosaur National Monument–known as Carnegie Quarry–online for the benefit of researchers, interpretive staff and the general public.

At the start of the 2015 summer GeoCorps America season, the project started out with of a century’s worth of paper documents (correspondence, memos, progress reports, planning and development documents, etc.), an offline database, a collection of thousands of digital photos of fossils, a vector illustration of the fossils in the quarry face, and one bold vision.

Over the twelve week program, these parts came together in a single online resource. Thousands of archives were read and evaluated for relevance to project goals, and efficiently digitized using iPads and scanning apps. Descriptions and metadata were recorded in Google Drive and later WordPress as a means of making each document search-engine-discoverable as well as easily parsed by human readers. In order to produce a functional demo of the Digital Quarry Project, the GeoCorps participants practiced and acquired a range of skills, including web design and development, digital photography, graphic design, web content strategy and management, writing for the public, information architecture, project planning, digital archiving, functional leadership, rock climbing for fossil data recording purposes, and team collaboration.

A walkthrough of the digital quarry will be made during the presentation.