The AuScope National Virtual Core Library (NVCL) infrastructure program is a longstanding collaboration between the Australian state and territory geological surveys and the CSIRO, supported by the Australian National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy since 2007. The goal of the NVCL is to record the mineral assemblages of the upper 1–2 km of the Australian continent by means of drill-core sensing technologies and to make this world’s largest mineralogical database publicly accessible, following the findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable data principle. By considering the whole Australian continent, the NVCL follows a holistic approach, being agnostic to mineral deposit types and impervious to the fast-paced boom and bust cycle of the minerals industry. The aim of this contribution is to provide an update about the national and international impact of the NVCL for researchers, government agencies and industry. Currently, hyperspectral drill-core data sets from about 6000 drill cores from across the Australian continent are publicly available via AuScope’s Discovery Portal and other webportals, including those operated by the six Australian NVCL nodes at the Geological Survey of New South Wales, Geological Survey of Queensland, Geological Survey of South Australia, Geological Survey of Western Australia, Mineral Resources Tasmania and the Northern Territory Geological Survey. The 1.6 billion hyperspectral data points are complemented by whole-rock geochemical and petrophysical data sets for selected drill cores. Through more than 50 publications in internationally peer-reviewed journals and more than 50 promotional workshops to more than 500 attendees, the NVCL has demonstrated the opportunities for addressing key geoscience challenges when integrating different drill-core analytical techniques, such as reflectance spectroscopy and geochemistry, and increasingly petrophysical data. All this is supported by continued developments of spectral reference libraries, processing workflows and best practice guidelines. The NVCL’s HyLogger3™ capability remains globally unique after 18 years of hyperspectral drill-core data collection. Three geological surveys have invested in upgrading to HyLogger4™—an initiative also supported by AuScope’s opportunity funding. The NVCL will continue to improve quality control procedures by analysing data collected from artificial standards and monitoring the performance of the hardware in close collaboration with the NVCL nodes. Breaking down barriers between the different disciplines of mineralogy, geochemistry and petrophysics will create opportunities for data integration and addressing geoscientific challenges, such as 3D inversion of geophysical and mineralogical data for characterising alteration footprints of critical metals mineral deposits through cover.
Laukamp et al. (Mon,) studied this question.