Hannah Norton Blog 9: Virtual Landscapes of Texas

Virtual Landscapes of Texas is a digital collection of public domain documents related to the early geologic exploration of Texas. The documents were selected from the holdings of the Walter Geology Library at the University of Texas and the project funded in part by a TexTreasures grant.

Collection Principles
The introductory letter by the Geology Librarian on the collection’s homepage does a good job of clarifying the purpose of the collection and what kinds of information it contains. According to this short narrative, the collection is designed to give a historical look at how Texans handled issues of energy, water, public safety, transportation, and economic development, issues that certainly remain relevant in the current day. To this effect, the documents are all in the public domain and include both primary documents and secondary reviews of early Texas geologic exploration. Presumably, objects were chosen directly by the Geology Librarian. Thus, once you get to document, it is relatively easy to use, but it is difficult to determine whether the document you have found is relevant until you look at its content.

Object Characteristics
Objects primarily consist of government documents from U.S. Geologic surveys to guidebooks to publications of the Texas Board of Water Engineers. Many documents are presented solely as PDFs for download (a disadvantage when browsing), while others are available for browsing. They are presented as text with images from the original document inserted into this text with a linked table of contents available for easier browsing. If desired, the user can also view the page scan itself. These documents also have an option to be formatted for printing.

Metadata
Not much metadata is readily apparent to the user of this collection, although I’m relatively certain that it is there somewhere, having heard a talk by someone who worked on this digitization project in which she was specifically discussing metadata standards. The alphabetical listing of publications shows the name of the publication and authors, and a list of search results includes only the title (and, where relevant, the page number within that publication where your particular search term was found). Information about publication date, size and format of file, method of digitization, and subject matter are not available in an aggregated format. The use of title only for browsing is somewhat redeemed by the fact that these geologic documents have quite detailed titles that provide relevant information about their subject matter.

Intended Audience
This resource is clearly intended for scholars and students with a particular interest in geologic history. Documents are text-heavy and often developed by governmental agencies and are thus not particularly accessible to non-academics.

Although I think the resources in this site are likely helpful and interesting to the geology community, the web site itself and method of accessing the resources would benefit from some updating.