Category Archives: Geosciences

USGS publications — 80% are online!

Posted on by
Reply

At a  meet­ing of the Geo­sciences Infor­ma­tion Soci­ety at the GSA Annual Meet­ing in Char­lotte, NC, in early Novem­ber, 2012.  This mile­stone was announced by Richard Huffine, the Library Direc­tor of the USGS.   He fur­ther said that the Open File Reports is the main series not com­plete yet.

Here is the link to an infor­ma­tion ses­sion he gave in August, 2012:  “Infor­ma­tion Resources from the U. S.  Geo­log­i­cal Survey”:

 http://www.slideshare.net/richardhuffine/usgs-info-resources-gpo-aug-2012

Geological resources from the Scout Report

Posted on by

Today’s Scout Report from the Uni­ver­sity of Wis­con­sin high­lights a cou­ple of websites/resources of interest:

The Perkins Geol­ogy Museum at the Uni­ver­sity of Vermont
http://www.uvm.edu/perkins/index.html  — The “Perkins Dig­i­tal Archive” con­tains >1000 images of min­er­als, fos­sils and rocks. Their col­lec­tion of  > 24,000 pho­tos doc­u­ment­ing Vermont’s “Land­scape Change Pro­gram” dates from 1690.  These col­lec­tions are searchable.
 
The Bar­ren Lands

The area west of Hud­son Bay in north­ern Man­i­toba and Saskatchewan was thor­oughly doc­u­mented and explored by Cana­dian geol­o­gist, J.B. Tyrrell in 1893 and 1894.  There are >5000 images in this col­lec­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Toronto.

U.S. Geological Survey adopting Vivisimo to improve NBII search platform

Posted on by

 

The U.S. Geo­log­i­cal Sur­vey has cho­sen Vivisimo, a provider of enter­prise search soft­ware and exper­tise, to pro­vide its web­site users data and infor­ma­tion from a num­ber of bio­log­i­cal data sources. Vivisimo Veloc­ity Search Plat­form will replace the USGS’ National Bio­log­i­cal Infor­ma­tion Infrastructure’s (NBII) search solu­tion and pro­vide a sin­gle search inter­face. NBII is a col­lab­o­ra­tive pro­gram to pro­vide increased access to data and infor­ma­tion on bio­log­i­cal resources. The pro­gram works with var­i­ous fed­eral, state, non-profit, and edu­ca­tional insti­tu­tions. The Veloc­ity imple­men­ta­tion will ini­tially search 30 data sources across mul­ti­ple agen­cies and uni­ver­si­ties. Veloc­ity will also enable geospa­tial dis­play of search results – allow­ing users to search for cer­tain plants or ani­mals in a spe­cific region or loca­tion. USGS will also incor­po­rate Velocity’s new con­cep­tual search to take advan­tage of its exten­sive and author­i­ta­tive Bio­com­plex­ity The­saurus.

Source: E-Content Mag­a­zine (ECX­tra) April 17, 2009.