The Corporate Administrative Records Collection of Geoscience Australia (GA) is a bi fold collection; consisting of electronic/digital documents and records in physical paper format. GA's corporate administrative records in physical format are created by the Records Management Unit upon request from staff members when their needs meet specific criteria. The files themselves are bound in cardboard folders and labelled and bar-coded according to their respective classification level and metadata information. Individually, the files are a detailed narrative of specific business activities; describing all of the administrative processes that occurred during an activity. The collection is organised according to a year series system; a method which has been constant throughout GA's evolution. The collection also consists of inherited physical records from various government departments. These include the AFFA series from the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Australia and the UB Series, sourced from the Uranium Branch. In collaboration with the relevant government departments, GA acceded custody of these series, and they are now managed in juxtaposition with the entire GA collection.

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The University of Geosciences in Wuhan is developing the computer systems to help the provincial surveys re-map the geology of China at 1:250 000 and 50 000 scales in just 12 years. With a land area 25% larger than Australia's, China has about 15 000 1:50 000 map sheets! The maps are really just by-products, though, as the ultimate goal is to build a computer database of the geology and mineral resources of the whole of China. LIU Songfa and I went to Wuhan in late 1999 to talk to Professor WU and his colleagues about techniques of field-data acquisition and geoscience database design.

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I am moved to write this article by an apparent lack of understanding by many geologists and managers of the growing importance of geoscience data models and transfer standards. I will try to explain why data models are becoming such a hot topic, why the exploration industry has already spent many millions of dollars on data models and why much more will be spent. The future of exploration companies may ultimately depend on how data models are used.

The national mineral deposits dataset covers 60 commodities and more than 1050 of Australia's most significant mineral deposits - current and historic mines and undeveloped deposits. Subsets can also be created based on any attribute in the database (e.g. commodity, geological region, state/territory).

Introduction Geoscience data are being generated at exponentially increasing volumes, and it is no longer feasible to develop centralized warehouses from which data are accessed. Efficient access to such data online in real time from distributed sources is rapidly becoming one of the major challenges in building cyberinfrastructures for the Earth Sciences. EXtensible Markup Language (XML) and web-based data delivery is a proven technology which allows access to standardized data on the fly via the internet. GeoSciML (GeoScience Markup Language) is a geoscience specific, XML-based, GML (Geography Markup Language) application that supports interchange of geoscience information. It has been built from various existing geoscience data model sources, particularly the North American Data Model (NADM) and XMML (eXtensible Mining Markup Language). It is being developed through the Interoperability Working Group of the Commission for the Management and Application of Geoscience Information (CGI), which is a commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). The Working Group is (currently) comprised of geology and information technology specialists from agencies in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. The GeoSciML Testbed In 2006, representatives from geological surveys in USA, Canada, UK, France, Sweden and Australia came together to develop a testbed that would utilize GeoSciML to access globally distributed geoscience map data (Duffy et al, 2006). Data was served from seven sites in six countries with several different WMS/WFS (Web Feature Service/Web Map Service) software solutions employed. Geological surveys in Canada, USA and Sweden used an ESRI ArcIMS platform (and in one case a MapServer platform) with a Cocoon wrapper to handle queries and transformations of XML documents. The UK and Australian geological surveys employed the open source GeoServer software to serve data from ArcSDE and Oracle sources. The French geological survey implemented a system using an Ionic RedSpider server for WMS and client, and a custom development to implement a WFS. Web clients were constructed in Vancouver, Canada using Phoenix, and later in Canberra, Australia using Moximedia IMF software to test various use case for the WMS/WFS services. Generic web clients, such as Carbon Tools Gaia 2 were also used to test some use cases. In addition to geologic map data, the testbed also demonstrated the capacity to share borehole data as GeoSciML. Two WFS (French and British) provided borehole data to a client able to display the borehole logs.

Papua New Guinea lies in a very active volcanic region of the world, where eruptions and other volcanic hazards can have disastrous results. To monitor the volcanoes, the Rabaul Volcanological Observatory (RVO) was established in 1940. Geoscience Australia has provided the RVO with technical aid in many forms, including (since 2010) advice and assistance in the creation of an information management system (IMS). The purpose, scope and design features of this system are described.