Geological Archives in space and time – new challenges for vintage data

The Geological Archives (geoarchives) of State Geological Surveys have an over 150 years old tradition. Since the first geological surveys were funded in the early 1870s State Geological Surveys collected, inventoried and provided samples, maps and reports from geoscientific exploration and analysis. As a result, geoarchives comprise a huge store of knowledge for geologic surveying and further applied questions. Thereby, work tasks in geoarchives have special focusses: (1) In contrast to classical steady-state archives, the inventory must be permanently available and usable for geological surveys and economic companies. (2) All inventory can accurately be georeferenced, i.e. even documents must be assumed to contain geoinformation. (3) Geoarchives contain material, e.g. rock samples, drill cores on the one hand and printed reports, maps and paper rolls on the other hand, with a broad spectrum of requirements on the storage conditions. With the commencement of the Geological Data Act (GeolDG) these tasks were recently expanded to aspects of digitalization and digital provision of geoarchive inventory. Therefore, all material must be completely checked, categorized and indexed with keywords to make the inventory FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). In our contribution we present the historical evolution and relevance of the geoarchive of the Landesamt für Geologie und Bergwesen Sachsen-Anhalt (LAGB) and explain our recent concepts against the background of the GeolDG.