Digital Access to Deep Time

A project to provide digital access to an important collection of geologic cartography from the Walter Geology Library has been completed.

The Deep Time Maps are a collection of paleogeographic maps showing the landscapes and oceans of ancient Earth through hundreds of millions of years of geologic time. These maps are an extraordinary resource for geoscientists, but have been inaccessible to users due to limits on the technology available for allowing access to this large of a collection.

The project to make this resource accessible online through the Libraries’ online presence was an idea that had been sitting around collecting “digital dust” for quite some time due to limits on the technology available for our use.

Senior Content Management Specialist Stacy Ogilvie took lead on the project to provide digital access to views of the Earth’s continents over the course of millions of years through the Libraries’ unified management resource system component Alma Digital. Adding this collection to Alma Digital is a significant step in increasing its accessibility to our users and fulfilling a goal that our late colleague Dennis Trombatore had in purchasing the materials. 

“The process also served as our first big test of adding a large collection to Alma Digital and the experience Stacy gained from working on this from scratch will help inform how we work more closely with SRD and add additional large collections to the Alma Digital workflow,” says Head of Content Management Corey Halaychik. “Her work on this front is invaluable to our team.”

View the available maps at the links below:

North America key time slices
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991047203019706011

Paleogeography of Europe
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058325874106011

Global paleogeography and tectonics in deep time

https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058405079206011

Paleogeography of Southwestern North America
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058404871506011

Paleogeography of Greater Permian Basin
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058404969506011

Paleogeography of the Western Interior Seaway of North America
https://search.lib.utexas.edu/permalink/01UTAU_INST/be14ds/alma991058404969306011

Leave a Reply