GeoRef: Highlighting Geology Library’s Jewels

July 19, 2007

Pat Dickerson, a research fellow in the Jackson School of Geosciences, wears many hats—from conducting geological field research to leading Smithsonian natural history field seminars to training NASA astronauts.

But to see her at her proverbial “day job,” simply walk to the back of the Walter Geology Library at The University of Texas at Austin, past row upon row of bookshelves. If she’s there at her desk in front of the large windows and her two computer monitors, she’s likely compiling information for the world’s largest geoscience database, GeoRef.

The GeoRef database, established by the American Geological Institute in 1967, contains more than 2.8 million references to geoscience journal articles, books, maps, conference papers, reports, dissertations, and theses. Students, teachers and researchers around the world access the database online, on local computer networks, or on CD-ROM. The collection, with help from Dickerson and about a dozen other indexer/editors, grows by more than 90,000 references each year.

Her work helps showcase the breadth and depth of the University’s geology collection, making materials more accessible to the public and enhancing the University’s image among scientists.

The GeoRef database contains more than 2.8 million references to geoscience journal articles, books, maps, conference papers, reports, dissertations, and theses.

“Entire geology libraries are donated to us,” said Dickerson. “And they often contain some real jewels.”

For example, after ARCO and AMOCO merged in 1998, the Dallas research lab of ARCO was dissolved. Much of their library went to the Walter Geology Library, including a wealth of international materials and internal reports that normally wouldn’t be available to the public. Individuals like James Lee Wilson, a prominent carbonate geologist, have also donated their personal libraries.

Then there are specialist research conferences and symposia, “which perhaps only 40 people attend and for which a set of abstracts and proceedings is produced,” said Dickerson. “That material rarely makes it into the public domain and it’s something I target for the database, to capture emerging research themes.”

Dickerson is also fulfilling a need for more Spanish-language materials from Latin America in the database, again highlighting a particular strength of the University’s collections.

“Those publications have historically been difficult to get and have been underrepresented in the database,” said Dickerson. They also sometimes dovetail with her own geological research, which explores the tectonic evolution of Texas and adjacent Mexico from the Precambrian to the present, and which now embraces the Argentine Precordillera.

A couple of years ago, a donated collection included an original copy of a seminal paper in Argentine geology.

Fossil trilobites discovered in the Andes Mountains are evidence of a prehistoric connection between Texas and South America. Engraving from "Geologische Formationskunde," by von Emanuel Kayser, 1902.

“It was like holding a piece of the grail,” said Dickerson.

The paper, written by Horacio Harrington, was published in Spanish in 1938 in an Argentine geological journal. Harrington commented on North American fossil trilobites that were found in Cambrian-Ordovician rocks in South America’s Andes Mountains. In the Ordovician, trilobites and other faunas lived and developed in specific regions, such as North America, and weren’t widely distributed—that is, it was a time of high endemism. Harrington couldn’t explain why they appeared so far apart geographically, but he accurately described what he saw.

With the evolution of plate tectonic theory, geologists can now test and accept the notion that a former piece of present-day Texas is now part of the Andes. But in the 1930s, few respected geologists believed that pieces of Earth’s crust shifted with respect to each other over time.

“It would be fun to get inside the mind of Harrington and know what he made of that,” said Dickerson. “You can imagine someone making such a discovery and wondering, ‘Are we correct in our ideas of endemism? Does this overthrow something we thought we knew?’”

By Marc Airhart

For more information about the Jackson School, contact J.B. Bird at jbird@jsg.utexas.edu, 512-232-9623.