Fieldtrips - Tuesday Afternoon, July 14

Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility

The Ruth Lilly Auxiliary Library Facility (ALF) is a high-density shelving facility designed to alleviate space constraints in the Indiana University Libraries. It provides low-cost housing with conservation-level environmental controls for library materials. Low-use materials, archives, manuscripts, as well as rare and fragile materials are transferred to the ALF from many campus library locations. The facility also includes a state-of-the-art preservation laboratory as well as space and staff for accessioning and lending materials from the secure collections vault with a capacity of approximately 2,800,000 bound volumes. The field trip will emphasize the materials handling aspects of large collections of items, with special attention to efficiencies in handling, storing, and accessioning items from such a collection.

IGS Mine Map Preservation Laboratory

The Indiana Geological Survey (IGS) has been working for over 20 years to establish a reliable and accurate underground coal mine map system. The Indiana Coal Mine Information System (CMIS) had been built extensively upon photo images of mine maps; thus the accuracy was not always at a level that would allow precise location determination of all underground voids. In response to the 2002 Quecreek Mine disaster in Pennsylvania, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) realized that incomplete and faulty mine maps were to blame – due to the lack of accessibility to the final mine map. To obviate future such events, MSHA and the Office of Surface Mining (OSM) began supporting the development of accurate and readily available underground mine maps for every state. The MSHA/OSM-funded initiative has allowed the IGS research staff to investigate techniques to flatten and stabilize original mine maps; and scan, digitize, orthorectify, georeference, and archive them. The integration of the digital images and associated data into the IGS GIS, and how those data are served to the public were developed by CMIS staff. The field trip will emphasize the techniques developed through decades of investigations.

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