OPEN ACCESS GEOLOGY: USING THE INSTITUTIONAL REPOSITORY TO HOST STATE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY PUBLICATIONS

Abstract

The Minnesota Geological Survey (MGS) hosts information systems containing data sets that are valuable historic and scientific resources for the state. Several options are being pursued to curate, preserve, describe, and disseminate these data to broader audiences, including web services, national data archives, and institutional repositories. One of the challenges has been to find a means to make available scanned versions of geological survey publications. Geoscience research literature is increasingly published electronically and made digitally available for immediate online access. For state geological survey publications, a library-run institutional repository (IR) can be an excellent solution to host digitized and born-digital content. In the past few years, MGS has scanned all of its publications published since 1872 through a number of library and state preservation grants. The comprehensive project included over 40,000 pages of reports, guidebooks, and bulletins, and over 600 maps, along with GIS data files from recent decades. This talk will describe how the MGS content was archived in the university’s institutional repository and the issues and challenges we faced such as format decisions, workflow issues, and modes of user access.