Kentucky Geological Survey FY2018 Geologic Data Preservation Project

The Kentucky Geological Survey 2018 Data Preservation project proposes two distinct objectives. These are: 1) organize, scan, digitally archive, create metadata, and make available to the public documents related to a historic collection of oil and gas wells, and 2) assess and inventory abandoned data and material collections located throughout KGS. Objective 1 - Oil and gas document scanning This objective is to review, scan, create item-level metadata, and disseminate to the public oil and gas well documents from a collection of 15 banker boxes of donated oil and gas documents in the KGS office. These records are important to enhancing energy production in Kentucky because many of the documents describe producing oil and gas wells from across Kentucky that are not currently in the KGS database or available online to the public. Records of the location, geology, and production from existing wells are vitally important to the energy industry for oil and gas exploration. The proposed approach is to use the established KGS workflow to review, scan, and build the archive and online files as a single process so the work will have immediate benefits. The documents will be reviewed and reconciled, barcoded with a KGS number, scanned into TIFF format, stored on KGS file servers, and the scan quality checked. The images will be converted to both JPEG (for well log documents) and PDF (for page-sized documents) and final images disseminated online in both TIFF and JPEG format (for well log documents) and PDF format (for page-sized documents). Item-level metadata from oil and gas wells not in the KGS database will also be entered. After scanning of each set of well documents is complete, the documents will be placed in numbered archive banker boxes and stored at the KGS core facility. This workflow has been tested and proven to be effective and efficient. With two student workers in the Lexington office and oversight from a manager, this objective is proposed to take six months to complete review, scanning, and metadata entry of the donated records. Objective 2 – Inventory abandoned data and material collections KGS has recently endured several staff retirements leaving behind collections of papers, data sets, publications, photographs and more. This objective proposes an inventory project to assess these collections to determine their contents, the geologic and historical value of each collection, and identify what activities are left to officially archive the collections. Currently housed in roughly 13 standalone file cabinets, 4 flat file cabinets (105 drawers), 23 boxes, and several other surfaces, this objective will require one student working 20 hours a week for six months to identify their contents, categorize them by project or data collection, collect metadata about the individual collections, and assist a manager to create action plans for final archival procedures per collection. The student will use the established KGS data entry workflow to record and enter metadata about these collections into our collection inventory databases. We anticipate generating future preservation projects from this activity including preserving old data sets through data entry, scanning, digitization, and modernizing antiquated storage. To complement our efforts and take advantage of our relationship with the University of Kentucky the Survey will seek an unpaid Library Sciences intern from the UK School of Information Science to work 10 hours a week for a semester to provide their knowledge about preserving collections and improve our current procedures and workflow for metadata entry.