Abstract
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), in partnership with other agencies, is currently undertaking comprehensive sub-basin assessments statewide over a ten-year period. Southeast Minnesota has over 17,500 kilometers of perennial and intermittent streams, making the task of comprehensive sub-basin assessment challenging; the task is further complicated by karst geology. In the summer of 2014, a pilot project began between the MPCA and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to digitally preserve paper documents which capture qualitative and quantitative data about the hydrology, water chemistry, geomorphology, biology, land use and karst features of southeast Minnesota streams. The paper documents in file cabinets were not in an accessible or easy-to-use format; as such, they were in a ‘data silo.’ The task was to preserve the documents so as to make the data usable by converting the documents into a digital format (Adobe PDF, GeoTIFF, ESRI Feature Class). To date, more than 4,000 documents (of an estimated more than 12,000) have been converted, made text-searchable, prepared for storage in a document management system, and made more accessible through a geographic information system (GIS). This previously inaccessible data is an important piece in understanding the karst region of southeast Minnesota. Within the documents scanned thus far, over 400 springs and other karst features have been identified, which are not currently recorded in Minnesota’s Karst Feature GIS Database.
Rights Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/9780991000951.1042
Finding Springs in the File Cabinet
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), in partnership with other agencies, is currently undertaking comprehensive sub-basin assessments statewide over a ten-year period. Southeast Minnesota has over 17,500 kilometers of perennial and intermittent streams, making the task of comprehensive sub-basin assessment challenging; the task is further complicated by karst geology. In the summer of 2014, a pilot project began between the MPCA and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to digitally preserve paper documents which capture qualitative and quantitative data about the hydrology, water chemistry, geomorphology, biology, land use and karst features of southeast Minnesota streams. The paper documents in file cabinets were not in an accessible or easy-to-use format; as such, they were in a ‘data silo.’ The task was to preserve the documents so as to make the data usable by converting the documents into a digital format (Adobe PDF, GeoTIFF, ESRI Feature Class). To date, more than 4,000 documents (of an estimated more than 12,000) have been converted, made text-searchable, prepared for storage in a document management system, and made more accessible through a geographic information system (GIS). This previously inaccessible data is an important piece in understanding the karst region of southeast Minnesota. Within the documents scanned thus far, over 400 springs and other karst features have been identified, which are not currently recorded in Minnesota’s Karst Feature GIS Database.
