Current Committee Role:

Collections Officer

About Me: 

I am Head of the National Geological Repository at the British Geological Survey (BGS), responsible for the team that looks after the largest British geoscience sample collection (around 16 million specimens), 20km of records, and one of the main UK geological libraries. I have been seriously interested in collecting fossils since the age of 13, and did a PhD on the Silurian graptolites of the Oslo Region. Experience gained whilst running a manufacturing facility then proved useful when I designed one of the earliest sample digitisation conveyor systems in 2009.

I joined BGS in 2000 with a personal mission to open up the BGS collections for study and use. I am particularly interested in promoting access to collections and information through digitisation and web delivery – an area in which the BGS is a world leader. We have delivered photographs via the web for many years – e.g. the National Building Stone Collection (4300 images) . Use of the JP2 (JPEG 2000) format allows web access to high resolution images, and has been used for several collections including UK continental shelf hydrocarbon well core samples (See for example). It has also been used for the Historical maps of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland and Magnetograms .

We have recently used JP2s for high resolution fossil images, including stereo anaglyphs, and high resolution images of petrological thin sections (30 µ thick rock slices) – or search the database . The ultimate form of specimen digitisation is the 3d digital model. The JISC funded GB/3D fossil types on line project has captured several thousand such models. For digitisation to make a difference, it needs a critical mass. The UK hydrocarbon core photographs total 140,000 and the rock thin sections represent 160,000 rocks.

As GCG Collections Officer, I am responsible for all our collections related activities.