Earth Collections: accession series database

The accession series comprises over 20,000 rock specimens collected and catalogued by the Department of Earth Sciences of Oxford University. The series was started by Dr J. V. Harrison in 1938 from his own collections and added to through the years by department staff, students and visitors. The main sources for the collection have been from:

Staff research
Students, as part of their DPhil or MSc studies
Purchases for teaching or reference
Visitors' collections illustrating suites of rock from their research areas
Rocks from institutions such as mining companies and geological surveys

Doctor of philosophy graduates were required to leave a properly documented suite of rocks for the series and nearly sixty higher degrees are represented. The collection is fairly complete to the mid-1980s, but specimens collected since then have not yet been added. However, bringing the series up to date by cataloguing at specimen level is in progress. In the late 1990s samples of little curatorial value were discarded, leaving a fully-documented and representative collection spanning over fifty years from one of the major university earth science departments of the twentieth century.

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How to use the databases
A guide to searching the databases

Enquiries regarding the collections should be sent to: earth@oum.ox.ac.uk