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The outcomes for projects C19030, C15045 and C12044 have been UPDATED and are available at C22026.
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An annotated bibliography of rehabilitation on New South Wales coal mines has been developed to enable interested parties to become aware of historical work undertaken on rehabilitation issues in NSW. In addition to organising references in the one location, the database will aid in the identification of knowledge gaps, allow employees to access past rehabilitation procedures and enable records of historical research trials in the region to be considered when new research areas are proposed. These benefits will eventually contribute to a more efficient approach to environmental management on coal mines in NSW.
The project aimed to develop a state of the art, single source database, providing advanced search capabilities and a user-friendly interface. It was developed to store reference information related to NSW coal mine rehabilitation and contains both published work (eg. published proceedings and journal papers), and so called grey literature (i.e. site reports, theses etc).
An approach using Microsoft Visual Web Developer to create a web front-end writing to an SQL Server database was adopted. Specifically this entailed creating the web interface using ASP.NET, with VB.NET as the programming logic to create dynamic web pages (i.e. in real-time as the user interacts with the web page) and to handle interactions between the web front-end and the database back-end. Programming techniques were used in a way such that database interactions were separated logically from the web search & display code. This approach will ensure program robustness and allow scalability over time. Features of the system include: Secure company logon and industry standard SSL security protocol; Guest logon with restricted access; Simple and advanced search capabilities; Automatic Extended Search if necessary; and record saving capabilities.
The identification of appropriate references for inclusion was undertaken using a variety of methods. A number of reference materials have been sourced via the internet. A primary source for much of this has been The University of Queensland Library catalogue and additional sources included ACARP and Libraries Australia. In addition, a number of site visits were undertaken to identify and source company reports not available throughout the wider community. Relevant details contained within these reports were then entered into the database although copies of the reports themselves were not taken, and as such, reports can not be sourced from CMLR. Presently there are over 200 references stored in the database covering the years 1975 to 2007.
One of the objectives of the programme was for the database to be of on-going relevance to the industry. For this to be achieved, references will need to be continually added and any technical problems encountered rectified, with feedback from end users facilitating this. It is also anticipated that the database will have the ability to be combined with the previously developed Queensland Coal Database (ACARP Project C12044), and eventually increase the scope to include the creation of a national coal rehabilitation reference source.