The Wisconsin Geological and Natural History Survey houses a large number of historical research collections with the potential to be of great interest to science historians, geology researchers, and Survey staff. I am cataloging these collections and converting them to easily used databases and web applications to allow access and to preserve the information. I am also tracking new and ongoing projects carried out by Survey geologists.
Current projects
Along with the day-to-day assistance with front-office management, my current projects include:
- completing the Earth MRI (Mineral Resources Inventory) FY 2019 work for the National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program (NGGDPP)
- assisting with the indexing and inventorying of cuttings from the New Jersey Zinc mine in southwestern Wisconsin (Funded by NGGDPP FY19 grant)
- working with our curator in inventorying at least 32 boxes of rocks, powders, field notes and maps from 20th century Wisconsin geologists (Funded by NGGDPP FY2020 grant)
- checking and updating our records in the National Geological Map Database for STATEMAP
- cataloging field notebooks produced by Survey geologists beginning in 1897 through the present.
- integrating metadata from historic field notebooks with metadata from our historical photograph collection and our database of hand samples and thin sections to tie collections together.
Completed projects
- WGNHS Data Viewer (web app): Funded by a grant from the National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program of the USGS, this project makes WGNHS geophysical logs and information about the Survey’s Quaternary core publicly available.
- Lake Superior Legacy Collection: The Lake Superior Division operated out of Madison from 1882 until 1905, produced more than 400 field notebooks, collected tens of thousands of hand samples and made 17,000 thin sections. In 2017, the Survey completed a 5-year data preservation project cataloging and providing online access to the material.
- Mineral exploration in northern Wisconsin: In 2018, we completed a project to scan and put online papers donated to us from the E.K. Lehmann and Associates exploration company. The documents detail exploration drilling in northern Wisconsin and provide information about core in our repository from 288 individual drill holes.