Maureen Wilks is the Geological Librarian. She oversees the Geological Information
Center, which has a specialized library on the geology of New
Mexico. She maintains numerous databases including the
Bibliography of geology, hydrology and mineral technology of New
Mexico, the New Mexico Geochronological Database, the
New Mexico Map Database, and the Historic Photograph Database. She also assists
in the Publication
Sales department. Maureen arrived in New Mexico
from Great Britain
in 1987 to pursue a Ph.D in geochemistry at New Mexico Tech and met her future
husband Bob MacLeod, an amazing electronic wizard under the hood of her beat up
old car. In 1995 she started to work part-time at the Bureau to begin to convert
their paper collections into more accessible digital datasets. In her other
part time position she is an artist and writer. In
2000 she collaborated with photographer Thomas Wiewandt in writing the text for
award winning The
Southwest Inside Out: An illustrated guide to the land and its history.
When not working she is out hiking in the desert, or scrambling over the
mountains of the Southwest
. In the hot summer months she likes to rescue snakes
from highways and neighbors backyards with the assistant of her husband who has
been passionate about snakes since he was six years old. She also chases after
flash floods and photographs, lizards, toads spiders, insects and wild flowers.
Since 2001 she has been working with her digital photographs of wildlife and
wildflowers transforming them into fine art pieces.
Education:
Current Projects:
1.
Mine Map Initiative: Organizing, cataloguing, georeferencing,
preserving, and scanning the historic coal mine map collection. The mine maps
are a smaller collection of the NM Map Database (see below). Funding for this
project has come from two grants, one from MSHA (Mine Safety & Health
Administration) and OSM (The Office of Surface Mining).
2.
Updating and maintaining the NM Map Database. In
2000 funds from the USGS enabled us to set up a Map Database to catalogue all
known geological, hydrological and geophysical maps published by the bureau.
This also includes MS and Ph.D thesis maps. As new quadrangle maps are mapped
this information is updated annually to the National
Mapping Index Database.
- Updating and maintaining the bibliographic
database of New Mexico.
4.
Scanning and OCR of out of print Bureau
publications.
- Updating and maintaining the
Historic Photo Collection. To date 5,400 historic photographs have been
scanned and catalogued into a database.
- Collaborate with the Mining and Minerals
Division of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources
Department to establish procedures to link databases among agencies.
- Updating and maintaining the New
Mexico Geochronological Database.
8.
Scan, OCR and create Web pages for the Table of
Contents of all 57 New Mexico Geological Society Guidebooks.
9.
Provide updates of unit names and references to
the National Geologic Map Database – Geologic Names Lexicon “Geolex”
Recent Publications:
- New
Mexico Geologic Highway Map, compiled by Maureen E. Wilks, 2005. New
Mexico Geological Society and New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral
Resources, 1 double-sided field-durable sheet containing text and figures,
scale 1:1,000,000
- McLemore, Virginia T.;
Hoffman, Gretchen K.; Mansell, Mark; Jones, Glen R.; Krueger, Christian
B.; Wilks, Maureen, 2005. Mining districts in New
Mexico, Open-file
Report 494, CD-ROM, 2005
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