The UK National Geological Repository: a case study in innovation

The UK National Geological Repository (UKNGR) is the largest collection of British geoscience samples, with 16m “specimens”, including 600 km of drillcore. Samples are available for study/subsampling by commercial organisations and researchers. Data, reports and publications must be returned. Raw data is available after 2 years. The scientific method requires published results to be repeatable, necessitating the archiving of samples. Re-purposing samples for new research saves money and time and thereby reduces risk. The National Geological Repository (NGR) has cost over £200bn to collect and the cost of a single deep cored borehole would be outside the funding of most research projects, so the operation of a NGR makes financial sense. Many of the boreholes have been extensively characterised, so new research can build on the wealth of published data. The NGR has been at the forefront of international efforts to utilise digitisation and the World Wide Web to improve the impact of the collections. GIS access was provided to the onshore borehole collection in 2000, and GIS and text searching the other collections was added over the next 10 years. This was followed by high resolution images of the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) cores, petrological thin sections, and images, stereo anaglyphs and 3D-digital models of British type fossils.