IMPROVING PUBLIC ACCESS TO MORE THAN A CENTURY OF MINERAL KNOWLEDGE IN MINNESOTA

The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources – Lands and Minerals Division (LAM) manages 12 million acres of state-owned mineral rights. State statutes describe the administrative rules and policies to guide LAM with receiving, using, storing, and sharing natural resource information useful for mineral management activities as well as supporting and promoting mineral exploration and development. LAM’s Mineral Potential Evaluation Section (MPES) collects, archives, and manages physical and digital information including mineral exploration, geoscience, and related land data. In addition, the MPES also accepts, curates, and manages geologic materials submitted and stored in the Hibbing Drill Core Library (DCL) – one of the largest public facilities of drill cores in the country. MPES has accumulated tens of thousands of historical and recent mineral exploration documents, archived over 12,000 drill cores and other geologic materials, and managed over 30,000 individual sampling points and related analytical results. While there have been multiple attempts to synthesize these data into a coherent database, the lack of resources has led to several independent collections and databases, making it difficult to efficiently retrieve, use, and store information.

The consolidated minerals database is a concerted effort to create an integrated documents database that facilitates cross-referencing and linkages with other internal and external databases, including the DCL database. MPES geologists curate documents into collections that are tagged with commodities, sites, and the entities involved with data collection and curation. Documents within a collection are tagged with document type, subject, content scope, geologic discipline, materials, and methods of data collection. Documents can also be linked to other collections and associated drillholes stored in the DCL. Users can perform text- and map-based searches, using tags to refine searches, as well as a variety of map layers (e.g., bedrock geology, drill cores, aeromagnetic maps, etc.) to help find desired documents.

Improvement and consolidation of the existing collections is desirable to safeguard against unforeseen events and to allow easier access to the data to by the global public for scientific, mineral extraction, and environmental purposes.