Making US Bureau of Mines’ Reports Accessible at AZGS Document Repository
For 85 years, ending in 1996, the US Bureau of Mines (USBM) drafted and released 1000s of seminal reports on mineral resources and mining technology in the United States. The contents of those reports still have value. Unfortunately, access to USBM reports frequently proves difficult.
To ascertain that our stakeholders, the Arizona mineral and mining community, decision-makers, and the Arizona public can retrieve Arizona-centric US Bureau of Mines publications, we are making them available for download at the Arizona Geological Survey’s online Document Repository.
The USBM published three major series as well as a number of special reports. Our objective is to provide access to Arizona-specific reports.
- USBM Information Circular (I.C.) (32 reports available) published 1936 - 1989
- USBM Report of Investigation (R.I.) (8 reports available) published 1948- 1988
- USBM Mineral Land Assessment (MLA) (~90 reports pending) published 1982 - 1995
The USBM I.C. and R.I. reports now accessible at the AZGS Document Repository cover a broad landscape of mineral- and mining-related topics. Including:
Placer Mining Heap-leach practices Processing gold and silver ore
Beryllium deposits Block-caving copper Mercury potential in Arizona
Iron Resources Tungsten Deposits Manganese deposits of E – W Arizona
Chrysotile deposits Uranium deposits Sand & Gravel deposits
Recovering Rutile Barite Deposits Artillery Peak Manganese
Incremental release of the ~ 90 MLA reports is scheduled for the next several weeks. MLA reports comprise two groups: 1) early reports assessing mineral resources within and near U.S. Forest Service RARE II and BLM Wilderness Study areas; and, 2) later reports systematically assessing mineral resources within U.S. Forest Service lands of Arizona (N. Niemuth, pers. Comm).
Acknowledgments. We thank the staff of the former Arizona Dept. of Mines and Mineral Resources for scanning and archiving electronic copies of BLM reports shared, or soon-to-be shared, at the AZGS Document Repository.
