PLACING COLVILLE RIVER DELTA RESEARCH ON THE INTERNET IN A DIGITAL LIBRARY FORMAT H. Jesse Walker1, Lynn Hadden2 1. Dept. of Geography, LSU, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 e-mail: [email protected] 2. Computing Services Center, LSU, Baton Rouge, LA 70803 e-mail: [email protected] Abstract The Colville River Delta, Alaska has been the subject of research by teams from Louisiana State University since 1961. Although nearly 200 articles, abstracts, reports, theses and dissertations about the delta have been produced, much of the research is still unpublished. In 1997, Louisiana State University initiated a long-term project devoted to the establishment of a digital library by utilizing Colville River Delta research materials. The objective is to make several thousand slides, black and white photographs, aerial photographs, diagrams, maps, and tables as well as publications available to students, researchers and other interested people via the internet. To date (September, 1997) more than 1000 items (including a number of theses, dissertations and published articles) have been digitized and are available through the URL http://appl003.lsu..edu/lsudigit.nsf. The procedures used and the infrastructure (e.g., equipment and computer programs) needed to support a digital library of arctic materials are being standardized at Louisiana State University. Introduction 1650 km, includes parts of three physiographic units. The Arctic Coastal Plain, within which the Colville In 1996, Louisiana State University (LSU) opened a River Delta is located, is the smallest of the three with multimillion dollar computer center on its Baton Rouge 10 per cent of the total. Elevations range from sea level campus. The Division of Computing Services, which is to 2324 m in the Brooks Range. Despite (or partly housed in the new center, initiated plans to establish a because of) its high latitude, it is the largest river in digital library that can store materials in an electronic Alaska that is not glacier-fed. The basin is asymmetrical format and can efficiently and effectively manipulate with only short tributaries flowing south into the main large research collections. Once in an electronic format, channel. The bulk of the drainage begins in the Brooks material will be disseminated on the WWW for the use Range and flows north across the foothills before ente- of scientists, engineers, administrators, students and ring the main river (Walker 1973). other interested individuals. The Colville River has created a roughly-triangular LSU administrators decided to initiate the digital delta with sides of 32, 37 and 42 km long and with an library project by utilizing the arctic research materials area that is nearly 1% of the size of its drainage basin. accumulated during the past 40 years at the University From the main channel a number of distributaries by its faculty, their students and colleagues. The project branch off to the northwest. The largest of these in the was begun by concentrating on the research centered Nechelic Channel which flows past the region's only around the Colville River Delta in arctic Alaska. Work town (Nuiqsut, which was founded in 1973) (Fig. 1). on the project was begun in July, 1996 with the assis- The actual number of distributaries varies with stage tance of graduate students, student workers, computer and through time. At normal stage, water exits the delta technicians and librarians. through 34 different mouths, although there are more than 5000 different routes it can take before entering the Arctic Ocean (Walker 1983). THE COLVILLE RIVER AND ITS DELTA The Colville River drains an area of 53,200 km2 and The entire drainage basin, including the Delta, is cha- has a length of 603 km. Its basin, with a perimeter of racterized by arctic climatic conditions. Winters are H. Jesse Walker, Lynn Hadden 1103 charge and suspended load (mineral, biotic and chemi- cal) variations (Fig. 1) (see e.g. Arnborg et al. 1967). More than 300 echosounding profiles were obtained. Riverbank erosion measurements, which have been continued to the present, were begun. The first presen- tation of Colville Delta information to the international community was at the First International Permafrost Conference in Purdue in 1963. It dealt with the relation- ship between permafrost, ice-wedges and riverbank erosion and introduced the Russian term for thermoero- sional niche (Fig. 3) into the English literature (Walker et al. 1966). During the rest of the 1960's, additional data on discharge, suspended load and bank erosion were accumulated. Beginning in 1971, the research expanded to include the river's impact on the nearshore areas of the su- baqueous delta. Surveys, made by helicopters (1971 and 1973), allowed the determination of the volume of water and suspended load that moved over and under the sea ice at the front of the Delta. Salinity, temperature and suspended load profiles were made beneath the ice at sea-ice stations, some occupied as many as seven times during breakup flooding. By those measure- ments, it was possible to use the advance of the fresh- water wedge beneath the ice to determine the volumes Figure 1. The Colville River Delta showing the hydrologic stations occupied in 1962. The map was published before the town of Nuiqsut was founded. long and cold; summers, short, cool and windy. The temperature and precipitation regimes insure that dur- ing eight or more months of the year nearly all surfaces are snow covered and that the vegetation is of the tun- dra variety. Further, the area is underlain by permafrost and supports ice wedges which frequently are evi- denced at the surface in the form of polygons (Fig. 2). THE NATURE OF THE RESEARCH MATERIALS BEING PLACED ON THE DIGITAL LIBRARY Colville River Delta research began in 1960, with the first field trip occurring during the summer of 1961. This research, sponsored by the Office of Naval Research and supported in the field by the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, Barrow, Alaska was conducted under the auspices of the Coastal Studies Institute at LSU. Because the Colville River and its delta, up to that time, had only rarely been mentioned in the literature and that mostly in explorer's journals (e.g. Stefansson 1912), it was practically unknown from a scientific standpoint. During the early 1960's, Colville River Delta research was mainly centered on the morphology of the Delta's Figure 2. Colville River Delta surface features showing several types of ice- distributaries and riverbanks and the river's stage, dis- wedge polygons. 1104 The 7th International Permafrost Conference Figure 3. Thermoerosional niche beneath peat block. Two days after the photo was taken, the block broke off at the ice wedge. of water reaching the sea. Because some of the floodwa- ter progressed over the nearshore ice, before draining through pressure-ridge cracks, some of its suspended load was deposited on top of the ice (Fig. 4). Figure 4. Map of the distribution and grain size of sediment deposited on the sea ice at the front of the Colville Delta in 1973. Beginning in 1981, Colville Delta research was spon- the type of item and a description. The object is then sored by the North Slope Borough's CIP (Capital scanned, and after scanning information about the size Improvement Plan) in connection with its dredge pro- of each file it is added into the master file. For image gram. Baseline studies were made near the head of the objects two gif (graphical information) files are created Colville Delta in 1981 and monitoring of the dredged a small thumbnail (for browsing) and a larger reference areas continued until 1995. Summaries of the results file for research purposes. If the object is text, a third file were presented to the NSB in seven annual reports is created in pdf (portable document format). The scan- (Walker 1994). ning can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a week (e.g. of monographs). Once the object file is created, it is then Although the precise number of objects from the LSU catalogued by librarians. Cataloguing data includes collection available for digitization has not yet been defining topical subjects, geographic subjects, uncon- determined, it will number several thousand. This total trolled terms, titles, authors, publishers, dates, object will be selected from about 15,000 slides, 10,000 black types, relation to other digital library objects, language and white prints, 2000 aerial photographs, 2000 data and coordinates. sheets, 20 years of field notes, 500 diagrams and graphs, 200 publications, reports, theses and dissertations and Traditional library cataloguing procedures using several hours of motion pictures. USMARC formats are a very time consuming process. Because of the volume of data to be catalogued in a PROCEDURES FOR PREPARING THE COLVILLE DELTA MATERIALS FOR THE DIGITAL LIBRARY Digital Library, using these same procedures would be There are several steps involved in describing and cat- prohibitive. The Dublin Core is the consensus on a core aloguing digital library objects, in this case, those mate- set of meta data elements to describe networked rials representative of the Colville River Delta as resources. This consensus was reached by 52 profes- described above. The criteria for selection includes such sionals from librarianship, computer science, text things as the age of an object, its uniqueness (e.g. aerial encoding and other related areas at a workshop spon- photographs) and its relevance to the overall collection sored by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) (Wactlar et al. 1996). Basic information is then entered and the National Center for Supercomputing into a master file list in a processing database. Applications (NCSA). These Dublin Core meta data ele- Information includes a file name (library object code), ments can be mapped to USMARC format. Use of the H.