Box 1 History of the Nova Scotia Well Logs Database

A timeline that covers the last 100 years shows milestones for the development of the Province of Nova Scotia’s (Canada) well record database (Figure Box 1-1). Although the oldest well construction record in the Nova Scotia Well Logs Database is from the 1920s, the submission of water well logs was originally required in 1965 when the province’s first generation of well construction regulations were developed (1965 Well Drilling Act). The Act made it mandatory for a well contractor to provide well logs to the government according to a prescribed form within 30 days of well completion. As part of the new system for tracking well construction in the province, a parallel effort was made to collect older well records volunteered by well contractors. These records were published annually in books (Figure Box 1-2). The province adopted an electronic database format for compiling well log data in the 1980s, with the digitization of older logs and the development of the modern database occurring in the early 2000s. In 2009 a version of the database was published for the first time in a spatial format as an online map viewer application (Figure Box 1-3).

Figure Box 1–1 – History of the development of the Nova Scotia Well Logs Database.

Figure Box 1–2 – Example of original hard copy book format for publishing Nova Scotia (Canada) well record information (Nova Scotia Department of Energy and Mines, 1968).

Figure Box 1–3 – Screenshot of Nova Scotia Groundwater Atlas showing well record data in an online map format, Nova Scotia, Canada.

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