The National Geological Repository (NGR) is a gateway to our shared subsurface. It is the UK most comprehensive collection of geological materials, consisting of over 16 million specimens and assembled over 200 years. The collection acts as both an evidence base of previous scientific endeavours and a resource for new and future research. 

The economic analysis shows that the NGR saves major energy and infrastructure projects significant costs through access and re-use of pre-drilled rock core:

• £1.5 billion in avoided drilling and analysis costs for major energy and infrastructure projects over the last 20 years
• Up to 36 times return on investment based on costs of maintaining the facility
• Time-savings of around three years per infrastructure project through access to legacy core samples
  

These returns are underpinned by the high costs of drilling new boreholes. It can cost more to drill an onshore borehole than run the NGR for a year and this can rise by a factor of 20 for offshore drilling.

Located at BGS headquarters in Keyworth, the NGR is home to the UK largest core storage and examination facility. Of particular value to industry and infrastructure projects are over 600 km of pre-drilled core from around the UK, which provide considerable cost and time-saving benefits.

“The BGS’ core facility (the National Geological Repository) is invaluable in enabling researchers to use legacy geological materials and data for new purposes in the transition to low-carbon energy.�

Gary Hampson, Professor of Sedimentary Geology, Imperial College London

“These cores were acquired at significant expense (often multiple hundreds of thousands of pounds per core) from offshore wells, specifically targeting areas of fundamental uncertainty in subsurface geology. Their preservation offers substantial economic and environmental value, as the cost of re-sampling or drilling new cores is prohibitively high. Moreover, the carbon footprint associated with new drilling can be significantly reduced by utilising these existing core samples for further research and decision-making, aligning with sustainability and Net Zero ambitions.�

Nick Terrell, Industry Co-Chair, Subsurface Task Force

The facility is trusted by government, regulators and industry to enable faster, better-informed decisions and is poised to enable UK clean energy infrastructure projects, including geothermal and carbon capture and storage.

As well as quantifying the impact of the NGR, the report also highlights a series of constraints that could limit the facility ability to deliver increased public value in future. Expansion will be required to accommodate further core acquisitions. This is vital as many present-day drilling operations are occurring in areas with potential for net zero technologies or mineral prospectivity, meaning the opportunity to re-use the core is high. Further potential lies in digitising the collection, as only a fraction of the physical holdings has been digitised to date, limiting the facility ability to deliver comprehensive remote access.

51ÁÔÆæ is exploring investment opportunities to secure and enhance the NGR long-term future and national value.

In a world of rapidly developing technology, paper archives can often be overlooked as a vital first step in information gathering. Whilst custodians, librarians and records staff take great care in the arrangement and management of such archives, there is also an ongoing campaign against the idea of archives as ‘dusty’ and ‘forgotten about’. However, despite our best efforts, all archives can use a little TLC sometimes. Throw a subtropical climate and creepy crawlies into the mix and things can get very dusty! This was something I found out during a recent trip to the Zambian Geological Survey Department (GSD) in January 2024.  

Our work in the archives 

I travelled to Lusaka, along with BGS geo-information ingestion team coordinator Wayne Newham and minerals resource and security flows team leader Joseph Mankelow. as part of a project funded by the (FCDO) that aims to assist with the promotion of the critical mineral potential of Zambia. An important component of the project is to identify existing information on the mineral resources of Zambia available from the GSD, which can be used to understand the occurrence in the country of minerals required for the clean energy transition. A foundational step in building this capacity is the appraisal and organisation of the survey physical data, which was the focus of our trip.  

On arrival at the GSD, we met with the library and records staff and learnt more about the status of the archive. Together, we identified the most effective method for organising the paper records. Although the GSD holds a wealth of geoscientific data, including maps and aerial photographs, the focus of our visit was on mineral exploration reports dating from the 1920s to the present day. All we needed was a quick sweep, mop and to dust away some of the cobwebs and we were ready to go. 

Over the next two-and-a-half weeks, we populated a digital index, which captured vital metadata for each report and recorded its physical location in the archive. By creating this searchable index, GSD staff will have a fuller picture of the data they hold and library and record staff can now respond to enquiries from external stakeholders more promptly, enhancing their reputation as an authoritative repository of minerals information. 

Downtime in Zambia 

In the time not spent working at the GSD, we took the opportunity to sample the local cuisine including chikanda, a Zambian dish made from boiled root tubers; nshima, a maize flour porridge, and impwa (‘garden eggs’ in English), a vegetable similar to aubergine. We were also lucky enough to be in the country during the African Cup of Nations Football League (AFCON CUP 2024) and evenings were spent cheering on the national team with the passionate locals. Despite the fact Zambia didn’t make it past the group stages, nothing could dampen the fans’ spirits and goals were celebrated with much dancing and jubilation. I found out this positive and friendly attitude is ubiquitous throughout this welcoming south-central African country.  

What next 

The project team will return to Lusaka in February 2024 to continue the archive work and to hold a workshop that will bring together representatives from GSD, the Ministry of Mining and Minerals Development, and the mineral exploration sector to facilitate discussion on the potential for long-term critical raw minerals supply from Zambia.Ìý

About the author

Ongoing and innovative geoscience research often depends on the re-use of legacy datasets, which can be valuable long after they have been collected. Of particular interest is data collected by publicly funded research, as it usually has fewer restrictions governing its re-use.Ìý

For many research projects that BGS is involved with, outputs and deliverables are hosted by institutions or companies and shared via websites. This method of delivering data to stakeholders may allow for easy and instant access to material, but it leaves data at risk and it is certainly not recommended for long-term storage. Ongoing data management, such as maintenance, compatibility and security of websites, is rarely costed into a project. Over time, this may result in loss of functionality and ultimately loss of access to the data, often occurring as ‘link rot’, where hyperlinks no longer point to the original web page or server.

One such example comes from the NERC-funded Rapid Global Geological Events Project (RGGE), which ran 1995–1998. The aim of RGGE was to identify the effects of climactic changes on modern sediments. The project focused on the , with two boreholes drilled on the south coast of England at Swanworth Quarry and Metherhills, Dorset. The work involved collecting core, laboratory work and field testing, and went on to support a large number of scientific publications. The quality and variety of data combined with its origins as a publicly funded project also made it ideal material for student projects.

Following completion of the project much of the analytical data and stratigraphic interpretations were stored in an openly accessible website. However, towards the end of 2020, the website was no longer accessible and, with that, all the data was lost. However, BGS held some of the wireline logging data from RGGE through their involvement with the initial project. The data had been rediscovered following unrelated work in 2015. During this time, a BGS member of staff had downloaded the rest of the RGGE data from the website to supply it to a student.

Once the external RGGE website went offline, the copy of the data held by BGS was one of the only copies of the complete dataset representing years of world-leading, publicly funded research. Unfortunately the list of associated publications was not downloaded and, as a result, has been lost. In order to secure this dataset in the long term and make it available for future reuse, it was decided to store it at the National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC).

At the time of data collection, no metadata standards were available to advise the scientists on acceptable file formats. The NGDC now maintains a list of preferred digital formats, which is updated annually. As many of the researchers on the RGGE project have since retired or left earth science, attribution of this dataset had to be undertaken over 20 years after the data was collected in order to store it in the NGDC.

is now secured with a digital object identifier (DOI) and made publicly available under the Open Government License. This not only guarantees the long-term storage and preservation of the data but also promotes its re-use for future research through clear and transparent licensing conditions.

This is a prime example on how project-specific applications such as websites may leave valuable and unique digital data vulnerable. Ongoing and future geoscience research is dependent on these types of datasets and, without securing them, we may compromise our ability to understand the subsurface and thus the quality of future research. Professionally maintained data centres providing long-term data stewardship should be the de facto option for the storage of geoscience data.Ìý

About the author

In 2016, the initial thoughts I had to explore creating a digital continuity at BGS were starting to develop. I had finished my MSc thesis, ‘Exploring digital preservation requirements: A case study from the National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC)’, which led to my peer-reviewed article being published in the Records Management Journal. I discovered that 51ÁÔÆæ (then still RCUK) was a corporate member of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), so I approached Juan Bicarregui, Chair of the DPC, to ask if I could join. I soon got into the habit of attending DPC events and meeting digital preservationists from around the world. Their jobs sounded fascinating so I took a postgraduate diploma in digital preservation at Aberystwyth University and learned more.

At BGS and NGDC, we hold lots of research data, both digital and analogue. I had run a small stakeholder survey as part of my thesis about the need to maintain the long-term accessibility and usability of our geoscience data. I started planning our work on a shoestring budget, talking to both research and data management staff, and it was clear that we needed a policy on how to deal with ‘aging’ digital data. Luckily, I had attended a workshop on how to write a digital preservation policy and, after researching other organisations’ policies, I wrote the first one for BGS.  

I was also rummaging in the BGS legacy media store (which contains thousands of pieces of various storage media) learning how to use the National Archives’ file format identification tool DROID, and talking to colleagues about their floppy disks, Lotus spreadsheets, Bentley MicroStations, emulation setups and old LTO tapes. These discussions gave me the idea to set up a pop-up computer museum on the first World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) in 2017.

It turned out to be very popular with BGS colleagues, some of whom had worked with the gadgets on display. Our data centre staff started to get involved in the outreach work and we were having more ad hoc discussions about adding preservation capability to our procedures.

During World Digital Preservation Day (WDPD) 2018, I delivered a taster preservation training session and a lunchtime talk about our preservation strategy, which was being developed at that time. We also published our first preferred file formats list and studied the PREMIS preservation metadata schema, with a view to developing a module to add to our Discovery Metadata.

In 2019, we ran a digital research data survey for BGS researchers to find out what was really happening at a grassroots level. The purpose was to inform our programme development and to strengthen links between research data management (RDM) and digital preservation. We then published an internal report describing our findings and started doing a gap analysis between the researchers’ needs and the RDM service provision. To showcase how we were combining our data management training course and preservation capability, I gave a talk at the International Digital Preservation Conference at the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam.

Just before the lockdown in 2020, BGS data scientist Alex helped us by scanning terabytes of data on corporate shared drives to find out exactly what we’ve got. The updated US Library of Congress annual recommended formats statement, which now included GIS, geospatial and 3D data, was useful as we updated our preferred formats list. We were also exploring the technical side of creating checksums and running fixity checks in our ingestion workflow when things came to a halt in March 2020.

In 2021, we picked up the work with a blast as we finally created a dedicated digital preservation team! Every team member has been at BGS for quite a while (more than 15 years) so they are well versed in geoscience data, as well as our data management processes and workflows. The team members had top-up training through the National Archives courses, got access to the Digital Preservation Coalition website and training materials, and we had many lively discussions about enhancing our capability at team meetings. This gave everyone more confidence to integrate preservation thinking and activities within their existing workflows.

After the first six months of working together, I invited the team to provide feedback on our work so far.

Working in the data management area at BGS for over 20 years, I have seen many changes in how data is captured. It has now become clear that digital data preservation is a key issue for the future of the data we hold.Ìý When Jaana asked me to join the newly formed digital preservation team I was very keen to get involved.Ìý I have spent the first few months reading articles and blogs, and undertaking the TNA/DPC training to give me the skills to help develop and implement digital preservation strategies and workflows, in particular to look at the ingestion, access, use and reuse of digital information and take active steps to preserve it for the future.

Sally Stolworthy.

My work with digital preservation began at the start of my career 15 years ago, getting in on the ground floor with digital capture of analogue records, both for wider delivery to science and as disaster recovery. In doing so I embraced open, long-term reproduction standards so that no one (myself included) would have to repeat the capture exercise again. I then moved to managing marine data, involving gradually migrating our data holdings to non-proprietary formats where possible. The team was small and the work varied, so it was important to make sure that I could pick up my own work again in the future, as there little more embarrassing than not understanding your own work. This meant things like embedding naming conventions into files and folder structures and writing documentation that explains what is here, what was done and what is still to be done were important.

I expanded this experience out to the wider records collections and collaborated on guidance on implementation of scanning standards, ingestion of other organisations’ data and, perhaps most importantly, worked on getting data back out to scientists and public users. Helping users understand our data holdings means they can do innovative things with them and there is a reciprocity in that they then understand how to organise and document their work for others to benefit from.

Rob Cooke.

About the author