Approximately 2100 samples of 400 minerals. A large and growing collection of mineral samples, many of which have been very well characterized by specialists of specific minerals. Selected samples from the National Museum of Natural History and the British Museum. We use a central business server concept with X-terminals on each user's desk. The laboratory spectrometers feed data in real time to the central machine.
Users can monitor spectrometer functions and data from their offices or even from remote locations.
Imaging spectroscopy data are huge. We maintain many tens of gigabytes of data, often analyzing many gigabytes at a time. The analysis flow of huge data volumes is kept off the network. They also serve as laboratory spectrometers when rapid spectra are needed. In calibrating standards in the field, we usually obtain hundreds of spectra at a site and average them to provide an average spectrum similar to what the remote sensing instruments measure.