Nottingham

I returning to the Midland for a visit to the UK Coal Authority and Alkane Energy. The Coal Authority issues the leases and licences for coal operations around the country and houses all the coal mining records and plans in a purpose built facility. I am totally amazed at the size of their archive and the way in which it is managed. The entire collection of 120000 plans has been scanned using a variety of scanners to cope with the variation of plan sizes. These images can be accessed by computer using a search facility that looks at the metadata attributed to each image. Whole plans or parts of plans can then be printed at any required scale. A brilliant system! They have also digitised the key information from all the plans for their GIS/oracle database and update it every two months with operational mine information. No electronic submission of data and all record tracing plans are hand drawn still. The GIS/oracle system is extremely well set up and allows for automated generation of reports on properties affected by undermining.

more to follow...