SAGEOLIT — The South African GEOlogical LITerature database.
SAGEOLIT is the geological literature database of the Council for Geoscience (previously the Geological Survey of South Africa). Originally designed for a mainframe environment, it was redesigned and moved to an Oracle® relational database in the early 1990s.
Data capture began with terminals and PCs which could only access the basic 127-character ASCII set. The abstracts were captured using optical character recognition technology, which has improved considerably in recent years but mathematical and other technical characters in older database records have had to be updated manually. This has led to minor differences between the SAGEOLIT database and the original text layout.
Paragraphs having been eliminated from the abstracts in the database, white space in the abstracts on these files have been added by the writer. Earlier publications did not have an abstract, and in which case the text stored in the 'Abstract' field of the database could be an introduction or a conclusion.
Most of the data has been captured by Martie Janse van Rensburg, over the past decade, using a scanner and OCR software which often, in earlier days, in converting the abstracts to text introduced many errors which she had to correct.
Information on errors and omissions, and constructive ideas on development, may be sent to rprice@geoscience.org.za. Updates will be produced regularly.
January 2003.