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Dartmouth College Library
Collection Management & Development Program
Collection Development Policy

EARTH SCIENCES

COLLECTION AREA
GENERAL PURPOSE
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PROGRAM
GENERAL SUBJECT BOUNDARIES
LANGUAGES
GEOGRAPHIC AREAS
TYPES OF MATERIALS COLLECTED
FORMAT OF MATERIALS COLLECTED
OTHER RESOURCES AVAILABLE
CREATION DATE
REVISION DATE
LC CLASS
BIBLIOGRAPHER

COLLECTING INTENSITY CHART is located on a separate page.

COLLECTION AREA
Earth Sciences: Environmental Geology, Geochemistry, Geology, Geomorphology, Hydrology, Oceanography, Remote Sensing, Soil Science

GENERAL PURPOSE
The primary goal of the Earth Sciences collection development program is to support the current research and instructional activities of the faculty and students in the Department of Earth Sciences. These activities include most of the basic and applied aspects of the earth sciences, and involve a wide range of geographic areas. The collection development program also aims to serve related interests of the faculty and students in the Thayer School of Engineering, the Geography Department and the Environmental Studies Program. The needs of non-major undergraduates, Dartmouth College staff, and the general public are also taken into consideration in the collection program.

The Earth Sciences include some very dynamic, fast-changing subject areas. Therefore, development of the collection aims to cover areas of emerging interest which may be included in future research and instruction programs. Older materials in the area of regional descriptive geology are collected. Other materials are collected retrospectively on a title-by-title basis. Historical materials are collected to support basic research in the history of geology.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE PROGRAM
The Earth Sciences Department offers an undergraduate Earth Sciences major and an undergraduate Environmental Earth Sciences major, both with an Honors option. Undergraduate majors are actively involved in research projects, and produce a written thesis based on their research in the senior year. The Earth Sciences Department offers the Master of Science and the Doctor of Philosophy degrees. Graduate students may work primarily with faculty in the Environmental Studies Program as Environmental Earth Sciences Fellows. All levels of students undertake both laboratory studies and field work. The undergraduate major program includes the "Stretch", an extended series of field trips, which has taken the undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty to areas of the Western United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and New Zealand.

"The Department of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth offers courses in all major disciplines devoted to the study of the earth, including its structure and development, the oceans and atmosphere, weather and climate, and the properties of other earthlike planets in the solar system. Teaching and research at an advanced level emphasize physical and historical geology, mineralogy and petrology, geophysics and geochemistry, structural geology and plate tectonics, mining geology, and remote sensing of the earth from aircraft and satellites." (Geology at Dartmouth: Teaching and Research in the Earth Sciences Department)

Courses cover all areas of geology, including some in which there is no active research program. Examples are geostatistics, medical geology, natural hazards, oceanography, paleontology, and volcanology.

Areas of on-going research are environmental biogeochemistry, isotope geochemistry, ore deposit formation, clay mineralogy, plate tectonics, remote sensing, GIS, processes of and theoretical models of mountain building, dating of sediments, hydrogeology, mass extinction, New England igneous and metamorphic geology, desertification, fluvial geomorphology, and climate change.

Research laboratories include facilities for stable and radiogenic isotopes, mass spectrometry, image processing, X-ray diffraction, and instruments for the study of rock magnetism.

Geographic areas of special interest to researchers are New England, the Western United States, Pakistan (the Himalayas), China, Mexico, New Zealand, Eastern Europe (the Carpathians), the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. However, there is interest in any seismically and tectonically active area in the world.

GENERAL SUBJECT BOUNDARIES
The collection includes materials in all the broad fields of interest in the earth sciences, as defined by the American Geological Institute for use in indexing materials for the Bibliography and Index of Geology. These areas are:

Other fields of interest included in the Earth Sciences collection are climatology, meteorology, and remote sensing of the environment.

Climatology and meteorology are covered in the Climatology Collection Development Policy. Some aspects of environmental geology are covered in the Environmental Studies Collection Development Policy. Geophysics is included in the Engineering Collection Development Policy, and aspects of geophysics related to space science are covered in the Physics Collection Development Policy. History of Earth Sciences is also covered in the History of Science policy.

Materials on disasters caused by natural geologic or atmospheric events are included in the collection.

The earth sciences collection resides primarily in the Kresge Physical Sciences Library. Relevant call number ranges in Kresge Library include: GB, GC, GE, QB600-QB700, QC800-QC999, QE, S590, S900-S970, TA705-710, TD172-500, and TN. Some remote sensing materials are in Baker, including important serial titles. Much of the geomorphology collection is in Baker Library. Also in Baker are proceedings of foreign science academies, which contain geological reports, and a collection of United States and United Nations government documents.

Most of the economic, engineering and mining geology (TN) collection is in Feldberg Library. Due to the needs of the Earth Sciences Department, more of this material is now coming to Kresge. Hydrogeology (GB651-GB2998) is covered by both Kresge and Feldberg. Environmental problems, such as groundwater pollution, can be found in Dana, Kresge and Feldberg.

LANGUAGES
English is the primary language of the collection. Materials are purchased in Spanish, French and German, and sometimes in Japanese and Chinese. Russian and Chinese language materials are mostly serials. Due to the regional nature of the earth sciences, material on the geology of a region will be purchased in whatever language is available.

GEOGRAPHIC AREAS
No geographic areas, including the moon and planets, are specifically excluded from the collection development program, although several geographic areas are emphasized due to particular past and/or on-going research interests. These areas are New England, New York, the Rocky Mountain West, California, Mexico, New Zealand, Eastern Europe (the Carpathians), Central America, South America, the Caribbean, Pakistan, India, the Himalayas and Antarctica. Materials about any part of the world that is tectonically and seismically interesting are collected.

TYPES OF MATERIAL COLLECTED
All types of materials are considered for the collection, including textbooks.

Publications of national and state geological surveys and societies, field-trip guidebooks and serials are emphasized.

The major retrospective and current indexes are included in the collection, in CD-ROM, print or online formats.

Non-Dartmouth dissertations and theses are added selectively, with emphasis on those relating to New England. In other subject areas, dissertations and theses are added to the collection on demand.

FORMAT OF MATERIALS COLLECTED
Materials in any format except flat maps are included in the collection. Geological maps that do not have accompanying text, and are published as flat maps, are in the Baker Map Room. See the Maps and Atlases Collection Development Policy. The USGS Envelope Map Series maps are part of the Kresge Library holdings.

The main microfiche collections are the USGS Open-File Reports, the Water Resources Investigations, and the climate data sets. Microform copies of dissertations and technical reports are occasionally added to the collection.

Aerial photographs may be collected as part of the remote sensing collection, but are housed according to space constraints.

Machine-readable data files are part of the collection, in the form of both floppy disks and CD-ROM disks. Maps, water and climate data, and photographs are among the type of data collected. Both bibliographic information and data sets are included in these formats. Access to bibliographic databases online or on CD-ROM has replaced the major printed indexes.

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND MANUSCRIPTS
The White Mountains and Stefansson collections in Baker are important resources for historical work.

OTHER RESOURCES AVAILABLE
The Library at the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratories in Hanover has an extensive collection in the areas of geophysics, permafrost, and soil mechanics. The libraries at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Vermont are useful sources of dissertations, particularly those on New England geology. The libraries at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Scripps Institution of Oceanography are useful for marine studies of all kinds.

Internet resources available include the USGS Home Page and the guide to Internet sources titled "On-line Resources for Earth Scientists" (ORES) ftp://ftp.csn.org/ores.txt.

Creation Date
1981 (Monique Cleland)

Revision Date
May, 1990 (Barbara DeFelice)
March, 1995 (Barbara DeFelice)

LC Class
GB, GC, GE, QB600-QB700, QC800-QC999, QE, S590, S900-S970, TA705-710, TD172-500, TN

Bibliographer
Barbara DeFelice

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Last updated January 28, 1999 by: CMDC@Dartmouth.Edu (jdh)