Introduction

In 1996, Louisiana State University (LSU) opened amultimillion dollar computer center on its Baton Rougecampus. The Division of Computing Services, which ishoused in the new center, initiated plans to establish adigital library that can store materials in an electronicformat and can efficiently and effectively manipulatelarge research collections. Once in an electronic format,material will be disseminated on the WWW for the useof scientists, engineers, administrators, students andother interested individuals.

LSU administrators decided to initiate the digitallibrary project by utilizing the arctic research materialsaccumulated during the past 40 years at the Universityby its faculty, their students and colleagues. The projectwas begun by concentrating on the research centeredaround the Colville River Delta in arctic Alaska. Workon the project was begun in July, 1996 with the assis-tance of graduate students, student workers, computertechnicians and librarians.

THE COLVILLE RIVER AND ITS DELTA

The Colville River drains an area of 53,200 km2 andhas a length of 603 km. Its basin, with a perimeter of

1650 km, includes parts of three physiographic units.The Arctic Coastal Plain, within which the ColvilleRiver Delta is located, is the smallest of the three with10 per cent of the total. Elevations range from sea levelto 2324 m in the Brooks Range. Despite (or partlybecause of) its high latitude, it is the largest river inAlaska that is not glacier-fed. The basin is asymmetricalwith only short tributaries flowing south into the mainchannel. The bulk of the drainage begins in the BrooksRange and flows north across the foothills before ente-ring the main river (Walker 1973).

The Colville River has created a roughly-triangulardelta with sides of 32, 37 and 42 km long and with anarea that is nearly 1% of the size of its drainage basin.From the main channel a number of distributariesbranch off to the northwest. The largest of these in theNechelic Channel which flows past the region's onlytown (Nuiqsut, which was founded in 1973) (Fig. 1).The actual number of distributaries varies with stageand through time. At normal stage, water exits the deltathrough 34 different mouths, although there are morethan 5000 different routes it can take before entering theArctic Ocean (Walker 1983).

The entire drainage basin, including the Delta, is cha-racterized by arctic climatic conditions. Winters are

Abstract

The Colville River Delta, Alaska has been the subject of research by teams from Louisiana State Universitysince 1961. Although nearly 200 articles, abstracts, reports, theses and dissertations about the delta have beenproduced, much of the research is still unpublished.

In 1997, Louisiana State University initiated a long-term project devoted to the establishment of a digitallibrary 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 availableto students, researchers and other interested people via the internet.

To date (September, 1997) more than 1000 items (including a number of theses, dissertations and publishedarticles) 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 adigital library of arctic materials are being standardized at Louisiana State University.

H. Jesse Walker, Lynn Hadden 1103

PLACING COLVILLE RIVER DELTA RESEARCH ON THE INTERNETIN A DIGITAL LIBRARY FORMAT

H. Jesse Walker1, Lynn Hadden2

1. Dept. of Geography, LSU, Baton Rouge, LA 70803e-mail: hwalker@lsu.edu

2. Computing Services Center, LSU, Baton Rouge, LA 70803e-mail: lynnh@lsu.edu

long and cold; summers, short, cool and windy. Thetemperature and precipitation regimes insure that dur-ing eight or more months of the year nearly all surfacesare snow covered and that the vegetation is of the tun-dra variety. Further, the area is underlain by permafrostand 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 thefirst field trip occurring during the summer of 1961.This research, sponsored by the Office of NavalResearch and supported in the field by the Naval ArcticResearch Laboratory, Barrow, Alaska was conductedunder the auspices of the Coastal Studies Institute atLSU. Because the Colville River and its delta, up to thattime, had only rarely been mentioned in the literatureand that mostly in explorer's journals (e.g. Stefansson1912), it was practically unknown from a scientificstandpoint.

During the early 1960's, Colville River Delta researchwas mainly centered on the morphology of the Delta'sdistributaries and riverbanks and the river's stage, dis-

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 beencontinued to the present, were begun. The first presen-tation of Colville Delta information to the internationalcommunity was at the First International PermafrostConference in Purdue in 1963. It dealt with the relation-ship between permafrost, ice-wedges and riverbankerosion and introduced the Russian term for thermoero-sional niche (Fig. 3) into the English literature (Walkeret al. 1966). During the rest of the 1960's, additional dataon discharge, suspended load and bank erosion wereaccumulated.

Beginning in 1971, the research expanded to includethe river's impact on the nearshore areas of the su-baqueous delta. Surveys, made by helicopters (1971 and1973), allowed the determination of the volume ofwater and suspended load that moved over and underthe sea ice at the front of the Delta. Salinity, temperatureand suspended load profiles were made beneath the iceat sea-ice stations, some occupied as many as seventimes 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

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Figure 1. The Colville River Delta showing the hydrologic stations occupiedin 1962. The map was published before the town of Nuiqsut was founded.

Figure 2. Colville River Delta surface features showing several types of ice-wedge polygons.

of water reaching the sea. Because some of the floodwa-ter progressed over the nearshore ice, before drainingthrough pressure-ridge cracks, some of its suspendedload was deposited on top of the ice (Fig. 4).

Beginning in 1981, Colville Delta research was spon-sored by the North Slope Borough's CIP (CapitalImprovement Plan) in connection with its dredge pro-gram. Baseline studies were made near the head of theColville Delta in 1981 and monitoring of the dredgedareas continued until 1995. Summaries of the resultswere presented to the NSB in seven annual reports(Walker 1994).

Although the precise number of objects from the LSUcollection available for digitization has not yet beendetermined, it will number several thousand. This totalwill be selected from about 15,000 slides, 10,000 blackand white prints, 2000 aerial photographs, 2000 datasheets, 20 years of field notes, 500 diagrams and graphs,200 publications, reports, theses and dissertations andseveral hours of motion pictures.

PROCEDURES FOR PREPARING THE COLVILLE DELTA MATERIALS FOR

THE DIGITAL LIBRARY

There are several steps involved in describing and cat-aloguing digital library objects, in this case, those mate-rials representative of the Colville River Delta asdescribed above. The criteria for selection includes suchthings as the age of an object, its uniqueness (e.g. aerialphotographs) and its relevance to the overall collection(Wactlar et al. 1996). Basic information is then enteredinto a master file list in a processing database.Information includes a file name (library object code),

the type of item and a description. The object is thenscanned, and after scanning information about the sizeof each file it is added into the master file. For imageobjects two gif (graphical information) files are createda small thumbnail (for browsing) and a larger referencefile for research purposes. If the object is text, a third fileis created in pdf (portable document format). The scan-ning can take anywhere from 30 minutes to a week (e.g.of monographs). Once the object file is created, it is thencatalogued by librarians. Cataloguing data includesdefining topical subjects, geographic subjects, uncon-trolled terms, titles, authors, publishers, dates, objecttypes, relation to other digital library objects, languageand coordinates.

Traditional library cataloguing procedures usingUSMARC formats are a very time consuming process.Because of the volume of data to be catalogued in aDigital Library, using these same procedures would beprohibitive. The Dublin Core is the consensus on a coreset of meta data elements to describe networkedresources. This consensus was reached by 52 profes-sionals from librarianship, computer science, textencoding and other related areas at a workshop spon-sored by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC)and the National Center for SupercomputingApplications (NCSA). These Dublin Core meta data ele-ments can be mapped to USMARC format. Use of the

H. Jesse Walker, Lynn Hadden 1105

Figure 3. Thermoerosional niche beneath peat block. Two days after the photowas taken, the block broke off at the ice wedge.

Figure 4. Map of the distribution and grain size of sediment deposited on thesea ice at the front of the Colville Delta in 1973.

Dublin Core minimizes the time and cost involved increating meta data records on very large digital collec-tions. Use of this meta data allows for access throughcurrent search engines while remaining flexible enoughto accommodate emerging internet search engineswhich may take advantage of HTML <meta> tags andSGML DTD's.

At this point the librarians also verify copyrights andobtain any permissions needed. After the cataloguingentry is complete, data are entered into tables throughprograms written by an applications analyst. The searchengine written for the digital library accesses informa-tion in these tables and the results are then available tothe user. The applications analyst is constantly upda-ting the programs that drive the digital library in orderto meet new user requirements or handle new objecttypes. These steps and the infrastructure in terms ofequipment and computer programs to support the digi-tal library were established through LSU's pilot projecton the Colville River Delta.

Conclusions

To date (September, 1997), more than 1000 objectshave been scanned and are available on the internet viathe URL http://appl003.lsu.edu/lsudigit.nsf. TheColville Delta materials presently on the internet can besearched for general information about the arctic envi-ronment by teachers, students, librarians and the laypublic. They can also be searched for specific informa-tion relevant to research on arctic delta topics such asice-wedge polygons, bank erosion and hydrology. Forexample, a person wanting images dealing with Arcticregions that are stored in the digital library wouldbegin by selecting the keyword "arctic regions" andthen by selecting the object type "images". This procedure will return all images stored in the librarythat deal with arctic regions between 1948 and 1996(Fig. 5). Further, the digital library provides the abilityto compare and contrast aerial photographs from diffe-rent time periods in order to determine morphologicchange.

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Figure 5. Example of a computer screen depicting the desire to search for images that relate to arctic regions.

Data about the Colville River Delta that, heretofore,would have only been available in a physical archivalform are now available to anyone with internet access.

H. Jesse Walker, Lynn Hadden 1107

References

Arnborg, L., Walker, H. and Peippo, J. (1967). Suspendedload in the Colville River, Alaska, 1962. GeografiskaAnnaler, 49A, 131-144.

Stefansson, V. (1912). My Life with the Eskimo . TheMacmillan Co., New York (538pp.).

Wactlar, H.D., Kanade, T., Smith, M. and Stevens, S. (1969).Intellient access to digital video informedia project. DigitalLibrary Initiative: Carnegie Mellon Univ. http://www.com-puter.org.80pubs/computer/dli/r50046.htm

Walker, H.J. (1973). Morphology of the North Slope. InBritton, M.E. (ed.), Alaskan Arctic

Tundra. Arctic Institute of North America, Washington, D.C.,Tech. Paper 25, pp. 49-92.

Walker, H.J. (1983). The delta's distributaries. In Walker, H.J.(ed.), The Colville River Delta Report 33G. North SlopeBorough, Barrow, AK. (41 pp).

Walker, H.J. (1994). Environmental impact of dredging in arc-tic Alaska (1981-1989). Arctic. 47, 176-183.

Walker, H.J., Arnborg, L. and Peippo, J. (1966). Permafrostand ice-wedge effect on riverbank erosion. In Proceedings1st International Permafrost Conference on Permafrost,Lafayette. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C., pp.164-171.