Contains the administrative and historical records of the Survey from 1835. The archive contains official files, correspondence, maps, photographs and many items dealing with the history of geology in general.

**Now superceded by CALM archives database**A brief finding list compiled in 1996/7 which derives its data from the earlier card and register lists. Earlier card indexes are still available at Keyworth. Virtually complete coverage of the archives of the Geological Society of London is included.

The BGS Publications Database contains metadata relating to documents created by the British Geological Survey (BGS). These documents include published works (commercially published, formally printed, listed for sale and available for general distribution to the public), as well as informally published technical reports and current report RR, OR, CR and IR series. The database contains documents which are released for general distribution, as well as confidential documents and documents which are available only to BGS staff. The database contains series of publications which have been used throughout the existence of the Geological Survey, including sheet memoirs, district memoirs, summaries of work and regional geological guides which date from the beginning of Geological Survey activity in the early 19th century to the present day. The database also contains RR (research), OR (open), CR (commissioned) and IR (internal) reports from the current BGS report series, as well as a large (over 25 000) number of technical reports created by various units within BGS from the 1940s through to the year 2000. Basic metadata about a publication are held, including its unique ID, reference number, year of publication, full title, author(s), series and publisher. Many publications are held in digital formats, either as scans of hard-copy documents or as born-digital files. Publications stored within the database are available to view, but are not available for download. Non-confidential technical reports are available to download in PDF format. The database can be browsed and reports accessed through the BGS Publications Viewer: https://webapps.bgs.ac.uk/data/publications/. The current series of open reports from BGS are available on the NERC Open Research Archive (NORA): https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/.

The BGS database of geological maps is an index into BGS holdings of modern and historical published geological maps, geological standards and field slips, and also contains a range of other map series, including geophysical maps, geochemical maps, hydrogeological maps, thematic maps and other small-scale miscellaneous non-series maps. Historical vertical and horizontal sections, as well as indices to colours, are also included. The database comprises map metadata, including the title, theme, survey and revision years, publication years, mapped geological theme, base material, map function, colouration, approval status and the spatial extent of each map sheet. An accompanying file store contains high-resolution JPEG2000 scans for delivery, as well as various digital master and delivery formats. For a small number of maps, no scan exists. In total, the database contains over 240,000 scans of over 130,000 maps and field slips. The majority of the maps in the database cover Great Britain, but other regions are also represented, including a historical series of 1-inch maps of Ireland, 6-inch maps of the Isle of Man, 1:25 000 scale maps of the Channel Islands, and various overseas maps. The database contains a record of all geological maps produced by the British Geological Survey and its predecessors since the commencement of systematic geological mapping in the 1830s. The BGS Maps Database is mostly an archive of previous BGS maps, and is not the same as the latest BGS digital mapping. The maps within the database may differ significantly from BGS digital vector mapping. Further information about BGS digital vector mapping is available on the BGS website, under 'BGS Datasets'. The database has evolved over time, originally being a series of discrete databases. These databases have now been aggregated into a single dataset. BGS published maps, as well as 1:10 560 and 1:10 000 large-scale geological maps of England and Wales, and Scotland, are available through the BGS Maps Portal. Field slips and some thematic maps are not included on the BGS Maps Portal. The information about a map is normally a transcription from the map itself. Sometimes key information such as the title may not be actually printed on the map. Where this is the case the information is supplied in square brackets, e.g. [Kirk Maiden]. Information in square brackets means the information is supplied by the cataloguer and is not transcribed from the item.

A spatial database of over 30 000 point localities which have been noted on geological field slips and their associated field note record cards or notebooks during the course of survey activity. The data cover areas surveyed from the early 1980s onwards, and contain a reference to the field slip, the version number of the field slip, the number of the locality point and a spatial location. The index contains only the locations of locality points. The textual descriptions of field localities are held on hard-copy field note record cards, which are held within the National Geoscience Data Centre (NGDC) and are accessible on request to BGS Enquiries. A high-level index of available field note record cards in Scotland is available via the NGDC Deposited Data Search: https://webapps.bgs.ac.uk/services/ngdc/accessions/index.html?simpleText=field%20note%20card#. Data were entered into the database by BGS staff from 1997 onwards. For more information, refer to: Kilpatrick, K., 1999. Users' Guide: Data Entry and Editing for the BGS Field Notebook Database. British Geological Survey technical report WO/99/6R. Kilpatrick, K., 1999. Users' Guide: Data Retrieval for the BGS Field Notebook Database. British Geological Survey technical report WO/99/7R.