OLD DATA, NEW METHODS: CREATING A DIGITAL CATALOG OF THE LAKE SUPERIOR LEGACY COLLECTION

Roland Irving established the Lake Superior Division of the USGS in 1882 at the University of Wisconsin. For nearly 40 years, Division geologists studied the Precambrian rocks of the Lake Superior region, filling nearly 500 field notebooks and collecting about 60,000 hand samples. From these samples approximately 18,000 thin sections were prepared, and many of these sections are described in detail by Irving and his protégé, Charles Van Hise. Their efforts represent pioneering work in petrographic microscopy. Today’s researchers can now gain access to the physical samples and original writings in this collection.

Charles Van Hise’s importance to the University of Wisconsin led the university’s Digital Collections to create an online collection of his field notebooks. Undertaken in 2011, this project became the first stage of an effort to digitize and catalog the entire Lake Superior Division collection. In 2012, we began to inventory and index the notebooks and physical samples. The Digital Collections also began scanning the ledgers of thin section descriptions and notebooks written by the Division’s other geologists.

The Wisconsin Geological Survey is making the Division’s physical samples available to today’s researchers. More importantly, information about the samples will also be available in an online database. Researchers will be able to search for physical samples by location, relate each thin section to the sample from which it was taken, and find the notebook and page number in which the sample was described. These notebooks can then be viewed online. The database will also provide the name of the geologist who authored each notebook, the year each sample was collected, and the general geology of the samples where that information was available. If there is a microscopic description of the sample, that information will be listed as well, and these, too, will be viewable online. The database will also contain photographs of the thin sections—in 2014 we began photographing the thin sections in plain- and crossed-polar light using a macro lens, and we will link these photographs to each of the database’s thin-section records. A map interface will show all of the samples in a given location along with the notebook metadata for each sample.