[Photo of: Black bears utilizing reclaimed mine area.]
A new offering from UBC Library at the University of British Columbia enables users to access decades of valuable information on mine reclamation for free.
Each year, the British Columbia Mine Reclamation Symposium is presented by the B.C. Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation (TRCR). This first symposium was held in 1977 as a response to a need in the province for enhanced government and industry communications in the area of environmental protection and reclamation associated with mining.
Proceedings of these symposia, covering not only B.C., but also Canadian and worldwide mines, are a valuable source of information on this important topic. Now, thanks to a successful collaboration between UBC Library and the TRCR, all conference papers – more than 600, dating from 1977 to the present – are available for free online.
The papers are hosted by cIRcle, UBC’s digital repository, which serves as an archive of UBC’s intellectual output. They can be found and searched at https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/6934.
The proceedings have proven to be a big draw. For example, the most popular paper – “Water management of the Steep Rock Iron Mines at Atikokan, Ontario during construction, operations, and after mine abandonment,” found at https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/2429/10657 – has been viewed and downloaded hundreds of times, mainly by users in the U.S. and Canada, but also by those from the U.K., Portugal, China, India , Finland and Norway.
This feature is a valuable resource for anyone in the mining and related industries who is involved with reclamation. Moreover, all recent UBC dissertations, including those related to mining, are available in cIRcle for free and can be found at https://circle.ubc.ca/handle/123456789/2.
The Northern Miner newspaper recently published a story on the mining reclamation symposia, cIRcle and UBC Library.
For more information, please contact Eugene Barsky, Science and Engineering Librarian, at eugene.barsky@ubc.ca.
Above Image Courtesy of: B.C. Technical and Research Committee on Reclamation Photo Gallery
Above excerpt in italics is courtesy of UBC Library News from UBC Library News blog – http://blogs.ubc.ca/librarynews/2010/10/04/mining-for-information/