NYSGA GUIDEBOOKS AND GEOSPATIAL INDEX NOW AVAILABLE

The NYSGA website now permits downloads of its collection of scanned Guidebooks for free. These include most of the years between 1956 and 2013, and the missing Guidebooks will be scanned and added shortly. The conferences, held at different locations, often visited stops over a hundred miles away and include much of NJ and some of PA and VT.

Guidebooks contain outcrop descriptions as well as papers analyzing the geology and putting it into a regional context. Often the detail presented is far beyond that generally available elsewhere: What fossils are found at what locality, for example, or the history of a mine or a mining community. Each guidebook includes work from many fields of study. Most sub-disciplines of Geology are represented, and some field trips emphasize botany, ecology, environmental sciences, etc.

We have produced an index keyed to the field trip stops. In the form of a database, it currently includes more than half of all the stops and views from the scanned guidebooks, and work on it continues. It is available online as a FileMaker database, a stand-alone app on the Mac platform, or it can be downloaded to an IOS device and accessed with the free FileMaker Go app.

Searches for a field trip leader, a particular fossil, or any term used in the Road Log descriptions will yield a found set of stops. These can be output in different formats including kml files and POI files which can be opened in various IOS navigations apps (Google Earth, PDF Maps, Pocket Earth, etc.). A proximity filter will find those stops within a certain distance from a given location. (IOS users will be able to use their current, GPS determined, location.)

This database is derived from kmz files, also available for free on the web, showing the routes followed by field trips over the past 58 years. Folks can follow the same route and see the same rocks that Nick Ratcliffe took people to in 1968 around the Cortlandt Complex or in 1980 on the Ramapo fault. Or revisit the stops and views noted by Ernie Muller as he led a trip to the Syracuse Channels in 1964. As of this writing 234 field trips from 32 guidebooks (1956-78, 1980-86, 1989 and 1994) have been traced out and entered into the index. They include locations for 1,784 scheduled stops and 3,113 "views," where the leader pointed out features, but no stops were made.