Current issues around climate change and environmental impact have justified naming the period we live in “Anthropocene”. Such issues pose an ongoing challenge that requires multidisciplinary approaches to be developed, which may provide better understanding of the events and their dynamics on a global scale.
Analytical methods deriving from multiple fields can provide knowledge related to various disciplines, which in turns helps interpret the past to understand the present and predict the future, through a holistic view of the world.
Data availability is crucial in this context and information retrieval should be implemented by users coming from a variety of professional backgrounds, thus allowing insights to be derived based on their different interpretations.
The Geologic Collections Management System (GCMS), certified by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), provides a solution to the challenge of creating a multidisciplinary data platform. A link to the platform is given below:
https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/cir1410.
The methodology based on data retrieval from the GCMS can be applied to data collections of various types, coming from history as well as natural science. Furthermore, it is based on international standards detailing data storage, data management and data retrieval best practices, following the trends towards a more digitalised world.
In the present project, in addition to the study and census of the archival and sedimentary sources, an attempt was made to identify a core repository of Lake Tovel. This was a first effort to apply a “classic” archives’ life cycle (current, deposit, historical) to the management of sediment cores, using cores at CNR IRSA Verbania.
A core repository is the site where the sediment samples are well-preserved. The repository becomes a structure suitable for the long-term management of collections and description of samples, through a set of minimum metadata allowing a univocal identification of each component, and serving to facilitate further scientific investigations.
Good practices in the management of sediment collections have been identified, especially at international level, in particular the Geologic Collections Management System (GCMS) of the United States Geological Survey.
Below an example of a meta database for handling and access to the collections of the sediment core from Lake Tovel stored at IRSA of Verbania.
The planet Earth can be visualised as an archive, as per a long-lasting Geoscience tradition dating back to 1766. In that year, chemist Torbern Olof Bergman described fossils as “medallions of a sort… laid down on the originating earth surface, whose layers are archives older than all [human] annals, and which appropriately investigated give much light on natural history of this our dwelling place“. Extra layers of abstraction have been added to this metaphor throughout the following years, leading to visualising the Earth as a collection of fossils and sediment samples. As suggested by the words of librarian Suzanne Briet (Paris 1894, Boulogne – sur – la – mer 1989), “…the photographs and catalogs of stars, the stones in a museum of mineralogy and the animals that are cataloged and shown in a zoo…”, the Earth is a world of archives.
Data management of collections
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Collection ID 1. Cores
- Series ID Trentino Lakes
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Placement in the room FF_RACK_A_Column_1_shelf_b
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Collection Date 1991-2000
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Repository ID CNR.IRSA_(VB)
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Storage Method Refrigerator/Freezer
Each sample must have following metadata:
SAMPLEID, DATE, COLLECTION ID, SAMPLING AREA
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