IAMG 2001--Cancún Technical Program--Session I

Home Page Technical Program Session I Intro Session I Papers

The Computers and Geosciences Silver Anniversary CD-ROM: 25 Years of Computer Program Code by Jean E. Hubay, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Eric C. Grunsky*, Alberta Geological Survey, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and Graeme F. Bonham-Carter, Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada In 2001 the Computers & Geosiences Silver Anniversary CD-ROM will be released as a special feature of Computers & Geosciences. This CD contains a compilation of 25 years of computer program code from papers published between 1975 to 2000. Program code was obtained in three forms. Since 1995, many programs were submitted in digital form and posted on the IAMG ftp site. These programs were used for part of the CD compilation. Also, where possible, authors of computer programs in pre-1995 volumes were contacted and invited to submit digital copies of their programs for the compilation. Many submissions were received from this campaign. Finally, computer programs that were not available in digital form were scanned and converted to raster pdf documents. Program code that was scanned was evaluated for the possibility of converting the images to ASCII code using optical character recognition software. Due to the varying quality of the scanned images, the differences in type fonts and the amount of proof reading required this approach was not pursued. Program codes in digital ascii were compressed into .zip formats. Scanned program codes were retained as .pdf files. A table of contents was created which was ported into a MS Access database. Each record of the database contains a complete citation of each paper published in Computers & Geosciences (including those without code). The citation information was obtained in part from GEOREF and in part from manual entry. Each record contains a hyper link to the corresponding .zip or .pdf file. A JAVA based search engine was selected for creating a searchable catalogue on the CD-ROM. This approach is independent of computing platform. Users can retrieve citations and links to the program code by searching by author, title, keyword(s), subject index, volume, number and year. The entire database is also available as an ascii text file, a MS Excel file, and a MS Access file.