Arizona Bureau of Mines Mining Files Collection Inventory

The Arizona Bureau of Mines (and later the Arizona Bureau of Geology and Mineral Technology and the Arizona Geological Survey) maintained a significant collection of primary data on mining districts, deposits, and prospects across Arizona. Some of this data has previously been utilized to contribute to earlier efforts by the U.S. Geological Survey to develop the Computerized Resources Information Bank (CRIB) as a centralized repository of organizing and summarizing data on mineral resources in the 1970’s. However, the primary data sources have previously only been available in person at the Arizona Geological Survey offices. Following the transfer of the Arizona Geological Survey to the University of Arizona in July 2016, these physical files were placed into storage and are presently not publicly accessible. In August 2020, AZGS undertook an inventory of the physical files funded by the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Geological and Geophysical Data Preservation Program (NGGDPP) with matching funds provided from Arizona Geological Survey’s line-item appropriation under the University of Arizona budget. Several students employed by the Arizona Geological Survey worked diligently on this for the next twelve months under the supervision of the senior author. Items inventoried include mining records, reports, maps, cross sections, and geophysical surveys. AZGS created a record for each item. This includes authorship, geographic location, descriptions, thematic keywords, spatial keywords, temporal keywords. AZGS hopes to use this catalog to identify unique data that is unavailable elsewhere for digitization in future preservation projects to make this data available to the public once again.Documents in the AZGS Documents Repository collection are made available by the Arizona Geological Survey (AZGS) and the University Libraries at the University of Arizona. For more information about items in this collection, please contact azgs-info@email.arizona.edu