BRINGING GEOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS INTO THE ONLINE WORLD

In 2012, SUNY Geneseo embarked on a project that aimed to digitize a paper-based filing system for its petrology teaching collection. We chose an online, open-source platform called Omeka to compile the data into a digital catalog known as “Geneseo Geoscience Collections”. Omeka is frequently utilized by librarians and humanities scholars to catalog and display huge collections. Its design allows for anyone with permission (including students) to add items to the database. It also offers options for the description of individual items, and gives the opportunity for significant customization if desired. It has been well-suited to cataloging our collection.

Since its inception, the “Geneseo Geoscience Collections” digital catalog has been used as a teaching tool in petrology courses and has been a resource that is accessible to the public. Students can study rocks outside of the classroom and can also look at the temporal and spatial relationships of samples in the catalog. Through capstone assignments, students enrolled in advanced petrology courses have had an essential role in enhancing the catalog. These students added information about the chemical, petrological, and even bibliographic data of samples and sample suites. The petrological information in the catalog has even been visited by geologists beyond Geneseo, sparking new digital dialogs about samples that would not have happened with a paper-only catalog.

More recently, the “Geneseo Geoscience Collections” digital catalog has been expanded to include maps and fossils. The addition of these materials into our digital catalog creates a much needed documentation of what we have in our department. It also opens up new possibilities for visitors to the digital space to explore relationships between samples in our collection and to link to other on-line resources associated with the samples. Searching the catalog by time or by region allows users to break down the silos that traditionally separate these geological materials.