Score one for the digital revolution!

Some of you know this, but I am a librarian. What that means isn’t quite as clear as it once was, but I work in a library and work with information.

My job, in a nutshell, is to facilitate the creation of digital collections which are available to a wider audience than a paper and ink collection. Anyone, from anywhere, can view the collections that we maintain in the Texas A&M repository, as opposed to a paper collection, that can only be seen or used by a person that is physically in the library.

This brings us to a collection, the Geologic Atlas of the United States, that actually predates my time here, but I have done some metadata work on it. This collection is a set of 227 geologic folios that were produced by the U.S. Geological Survey from 1894 to 1945. Included in the set are folios for New York City, Chicago, Milwaukee, and even Austin. (Be warned… the files are LARGE and will take a long time to download!)

Now, these map folios aren’t really rare, but a complete set is hard to come by. Many libraries have partial sets, including folios for their area. Texas A&M had a complete set, and set out to digitize them, and did it right.

On Monday, this email was sent out to a listserv for map librarians:

The Library of Virginia is giving away the following folios of the Geologic Atlas of the United States. They are listed by number only, but I have included a couple of links to Texas A & M Libraries’ digital collection of the folios, so you can see what’s what.

If you would like the folios, we request that you accept all of them.
Preference is given to libraries.

The folios are as follows: 2, 5, 6-8, 12-22, 24-25, 27-31, 44, 60, 76-79, 81-139, 141-182, 184-185, 187, 193, 195-199, 201, 207-210, 216-217.

http://txspace.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/2490

http://labs.di.tamu.edu:8080/geofolios/handle/123456789/2

What this means is that the Library of Virginia is so pleased with the digital versions that Texas A&M has produced and made available, that they are getting rid of their own paper copies. Texas A&M’s collection has become their collection.

So for those of you that really don’t know what I do or why it’s important… here it is.

Published in: on January 9, 2008 at 4:49 pm

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  1. On February 5, 2008 at 6:34 pm Yaly Said:

    Oh man. I know how you feel. When things go digital it can be easier to do stuff. I still like being able to pick up a book and read it, but the digital age is making change for the better most of the time.
    I work in an Archeology Lab and we have to enter a lot of information into the computer all the time. Not always a fun experience, but that guarantees that it will be there for other people to view and study. It’s all worth it in the end.

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