National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation for Kentucky Sites

The long-term data preservation effort at the Kentucky Geological Survey includes the expansion of its core and sample facility, a comprehensive inventory and stratigraphic indexing of existing materials, complete digitization of all geoscience data holdings, and development of web services to provide public access to all materials and data. In the previous two award periods, KGS has focused on creating site-level metadata for its most actively used data sets. A total of 9 thematic collections representing over 271,000 individual sites have been submitted to the Catalog and 5 additional collections are being prepared at the present time. These metadata records were formatted from existing databases by writing translation programs for each collection. Much of the remaining data held by KGS that could be added to the Catalog require a higher level of processing, including conversion from analog records to electronic databases. The data of greatest priority at this time is a collection of auger drillholes acquired during the original geologic mapping of the Jackson Purchase region of Kentucky. Records of this drilling program consist of microfiche images, and samples from the holes are kept at the agency well sample and core library. KGS is conducting new surficial mapping in the western Kentucky region through the STATEMAP program and is collaborating with the University of Kentucky Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences on an EDMAP proposal to map a quadrangle near Paducah, Kentucky. These data are not easily synthesized, because they are not consistently labeled, located, and matched to the physical sample sets. This proposal is a Digital Infrastructure project to convert this analog dataset to electronic formats. The approach will be to print paper copies of the microfiche images, compare recorded location descriptions to basemaps to make determinations of geographic coordinates, enter downhole lithologic information into a database, scan original documents, and match hole locations to sample sets. Once complete, site-level metadata will be submitted to the National Catalog. KGS has focused its efforts in the past two years on creation of site-level metadata for the NGGDPP catalog.