Improving online ordering of records scans : BGS GeoRecords [abstract only]

The British Geological Survey (BGS) receives 10 000 requests each year for copies of records held in the National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) collections. Public, academic and commercial users have for a number of years been able to access the indexes for these collections online through the Geoindex on the BGS website but when requesting copies, have had to revert to traditional phone, email and faxed orders. In 2007, however, following extensive user testing, the BGS introduced a new online service called GeoRecords alongside its existing online shops (http://shop.bgs.ac.uk). GeoRecords enables users to search, using a web GIS application, the index of borehole records held in the NGDC (over 1.2 million individual borehole records) and then to order them online. Orders are then passed automatically to a digital back-office system which BGS Enquiry Service staff use to track the orders and access the digital record scans. This has resulted in a significant improvement of efficiency to the benefit of both users and the BGS alike. An innovative ‘traffic light scoring’ feature in the GeoRecords back-office also enables the BGS Enquiry Service staff to quality check each scanned record during processing of the order. The results of this on-the-fly checking, of up to 40 000 individual records each year, are fed back to records management staff to enable continued improvements in the knowledge of and quality of the NGDC collections. This paper will show you how the GeoRecords system operates and how we hope it can be expanded (for example with online payment and online delivery of records) with the aim of further improving access to and exploitation of the National Geoscience Data Centre collections