Project Background
In 2004 and 2005, Boojum Research, as part of its transition to a virtual consulting company, donated its corporate research library to the J.N. Desmarais Library’s Mining Environment Database. The donation consisted of Boojum’s own technical reports and mine site assessments, as well as conference papers, journal articles, and chapters in books published by Margarete Kalin, Boojum’s founder and principal researcher. It also included journal off-prints, and other background materials related to mining and the environment, collected by the company to support its research. The majority of Boojum’s technical reports were submitted as full-text Adobe Acrobat PDF® files, and they are being made available, with limited restrictions, to the international community working on the environmental aspects of mining, as part of Laurentian’s Mining Environment Database. Hard copies of most of Boojum’s technical reports were also donated, and these have been added to the Desmarais Library’s circulating collection.
Project Summary
Between January and April, 2007, Boojum Research and the J.N. Desmarais Library collaborated in a co-operative placement program offered by the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario. The purpose of the project was to complete processing of the Boojum technical reports and publications, and design a Web-based visual representation and index to facilitate their access and display.
Boojum Research and the Desmarais Library each paid half of the salary costs for the four-month placement, approximately $11,000 (CDN), and the Library assumed all other associated costs related to benefits and vacation pay. Ms. Laura Luopa, a student at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies, as well as a Laurentian graduate and native of Sudbury, was selected to work in the Desmarais Library under the joint supervision of the editors of the Mining Environment Database, Glen Kelly and Ron Slater.
( R. Slater, L. Luopa, G. Kelly )
Project Results
By the end of the project, over 500 technical reports, as well as conference papers, poster presentations, book chapters and book reviews from Kalin’s research bibliography, and journal offprints and other research publications donated by Boojum, were accessible using the catalogue of the Mining Environment Database. More than 250 of these titles are freely available as Adobe PDF searchable files. For copyright and licensing reasons, access to the full text versions of some of Kalin’s published journal articles and conference papers is restricted by proxy to members of the Laurentian University community.
View a complete list of all donated Boojum publications in the Database.