We are working towards building up a fully-indexed working library of both physical and digital items.

Our aim is to collect information relating to minerals, mineralogy, petrology, gemology, mining and mining history and all related fields.

This will include:

Books
Magazines and Journals
Articles
Photographs
Artworks, postcards, posters and other promotional items
Video
Audio recordings
Maps and plans
Unpublished manuscripts, notes, maps, letters and collection catalogues
Dealer and collector labels

Our preference will always be to store digital copies of such items (where possible) rather than the physical item, however there will always be a need to store physical books and journals where no legal electronic version is available to us.

For those books that are out-of-copyright or that we can obtain permission from the author/publisher we will scan in the book (if no existing PDF is available) and then, if the book is in our possession, use it to trade for other items that we do not have within the library.

We do not want to be the custodians of valuable books and other historical items, we want to be the custodians of the information they contain.

Where is it possible for us to do so we will make these copies freely available through the website. The full library catalogue will be available online and we will be able to take requests to source information from the library from our users - the full intention of this library is for it to be a working library.

We are looking for donations of items that we many need for our library, whether it is a single pamphlet or an entire library. We are happy to go through lists to highlight only the items we need.

Our physical library will eventually be based at our forthcoming office in Tucson, Arizona.

If you have something you would like to donate please contact jolyon@mindat.org