The Geoscience Imagebase is the BGS internal corporate repository for photographic images and their metadata and run on commercial software called Assetbank from Bright Interactive. It also includes other types of images such as diagrams, PDF's etc when required. The images can be scans of analogue photographs, or images taken with a digital camera. A key feature to be aware of with the analogue material is that we often hold the metadata for an image but may not have scanned it and hence the image may not be directly available from the system. Each image is given a unique image number preceded with a 'P' this is used to reference images in publications or elsewhere. The system will allow the storage of variants of an original image, e.g. An image with a given number may be cropped and enhanced, in these cases, it is possible to hold the original and the image derived from the original together. The holdings of the Geoscience Imagebase is diverse. The 'core' of the collection is the old Land Survey field photograph collection which began in 1892. Subsequent additions are images (analogue and digital) taken by BGS geoscientists; images taken by official BGS photographers on a range of subjects including of subjects from the Material Collections e.g. fossils, rock specimens etc. and images held in the BGS archives derived from BGS or from external donations. A selection of images is made available to the public via the parallel Geoscenic.
