For programmers, a web service may be used to obtain MRDS records for geographic areas delimited by a bounding rectangle in latitude and longitude. An example serves to illustrate its usage:

http://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/search-bbox.php?xmin=-110&ymin=31.4&xmax=-109.85&ymax=31.45

This URL will return an XML document containing reports from 82 records of sites located near Bisbee, Arizona. The bounding coordinates are specified as

xmin = -110
ymin =   31.4
xmax = -109.85
ymax =   31.45

These numbers are expressed in the usual way in a web site URL, by omitting spaces and by separating each variable with an ampersand (&). The service can also be used to limit the query to reports concerning a specific commodity, like Copper, as follows:

http://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/search-bbox.php?xmin=-110&ymin=31.4&xmax=-109.85&ymax=31.45&com=CU

And with this additional constraint the result contains 68 records rather than 82.

For the convenience of USGS staff we have developed an add-in for use with ArcGIS version 10, and this add-in is also available for users of that software outside USGS. The add-in can be downloaded here:

mrds-addin.zip (322k bytes)

The package contains a file geodatabase arranged much like the one described here, the add-in itself MRDSaddin.esriaddin, and a map description file MRDS.mxd. Double-click the addin to install in ArcGIS 10.

With the MRDS addin installed, open MRDS.mxd, zoom to the geographic area you are interested in, and click the MRDS icon in the toolbar, a classic pick-and-hammer symbol. That will brin up a dialog giving you a few options for downloading MRDS records within the geographic extent of your data frame.

After clicking the button on the form to get data, you should see MRDS report locations on the map. These you can examine by using the identify tool and clicking individually. A few attributes are provided in the geodatabase for refined selection and symbolization, but most of the details of individual site records are obtained by clicking the URL provided in the Online Report data field. That should open a web browser and display the full report of that site from MRDS.

In general the add-in should work properly for reasonably small areas (for example a portion of a US state). If you need data covering many US states, you will probably find it easier to download the file geodatabase version of the entire collection of MRDS.

This addin should be considered experimental at this point (spring and summer 2011). Please let us know if you encounter difficulties with it by sending email to Peter Schweitzer.