National Geological And Geophysical Data Preservation Program

KGS is legislatively mandated to archive and make available oil and gas records for wells permitted through the Kentucky Division of Oil and Gas. Records are transmitted from the Division to the KGS Lexington office where they are scanned and prepared for online access. The KGS western Kentucky office maintains a separate file of historical well records that has been compiled from a variety of sources. This collection is known to contain some original documents not in the main office, as well as working copies that have valuable annotations that have been made over the years. The only access to these unique documents is by visual inspection of the original documents at the western Kentucky office. KGS has lacked resources to make significant progress with the comparison of the two collections to identify unique documents to scan and append to the online repository. There are estimated to be 80,000 document folders that need review, and this is likely to constitute a multi-year effort. The KGS 2013-14 NGGDPP project started this effort and was successful in completing the scanning and preparation of 20% of this oil and gas documents collection (20,000 pages of records from 6700 folders scanned to-date). Most of these newly scanned records are now available for viewing online through the KGS oil and gas data search. We are proposing to continue preserving this collecting by employing students both in the western Kentucky and the Lexington office to further this significant effort. The approach will be to review, scan, and rebuild the online file as a single process so the work will have immediate benefits. This workflow has been tested and proven.