Dear Oil and Gas Professional,

We are writing to you today to ask for your financial help to reach a goal for the OIL Information Library of Fort Worth to make it a more integral part of the community in Fort Worth and beyond. We are all aware that the onset of “the information age” led to a shift from predominantly hardcopy information to digital information in many fields of endeavor, in particular the oil and gas industry. I believe most would agree this digital change has led to a phenomenal increase in productivity for us all. However, I personally have seen numerous incidents where the digital information has not quite captured the whole story. Old scout ticket information has been neatly summarized for digital input, without much oversight as to additional information that might be important for future exploration and development efforts. Strip logs and old mudlogs do not necessarily lend themselves to digitization and are therefore not available to many, unless of course they are lucky enough to have access to an old fashion hardcopy oil & gas/energy library such as the OIL.

OIL does not stand alone in these efforts to archive and provide access to historical data. Our library has arranged cooperative relationships with many other oil and gas libraries such as Midland, Oklahoma City, Wichita Falls, etc. Together these facilities provide a service to our industry for use and preservation of what is sometimes one-of-a-kind information. The OIL board would like to move toward making OIL of Fort Worth a more important link in this chain of archival libraries, as well as, to significantly increase its utility to the regional populace.

Currently OIL has an outstanding scout ticket database, excellent log coverage on microfiche and other historical collections of data. It is imperative for OIL to expand these existing collections to a wider geographic area, upgrade our filing and cataloging systems for this data and finally transform much of this data, via scanning so as to preserve exactly the old information to a digital format. Reproduction of this data is also a very important service the library provides to the community and the equipment to do this is in need a significant upgrade.

In order to fulfill the primary mission of OIL to provide vital information to the general community, it is imperative that we increase the visibility of the library in the Fort Worth area, in Texas and in the surrounding states. We want people to know about what we have to offer and in that regard we have begun to upgrade our website at http://www.oilfw.org/.

Lastly should the need arise the library must be prepared to handle additional amounts of data to be archived. For example, if the explosion of drilling in the Barnett Shale, or the Fayetteville in Arkansas, or Woodford in Oklahoma, were to spin off unique collections of gathered data relative to the play we want to be prepared to be that repository, to preserve that data for future analysis.

The OIL is a non-profit 501(c3) entity. Thus your contributions should be tax deductible although it is highly recommended that you consult your own tax advisor to properly determine this based upon your individual tax and income situation. We hope you can help us reach our goal. Please direct questions to 817-332-4977 at that time you will be referred to the appropriate board member to handle your question. Please make checks payable to: OIL of Fort Worth.

____________________________ _________________________________

Mike O’Donnell, Chairman Capital Campaign Gordon Roberts, President

This page lists the goals of the campaign in case you want this additional information.

The Capital Campaign has numerous goals:

• One major goal of this campaign would be to set aside some funds which would allow registered residents who may have questions about the Barnett Shale activity to gain access to the library, free of charge, in order that they might gain a better understanding about earth science and the energy industry.

• A second major goal of this campaign would be to expand our co-operative arrangement with area professors and students that allows them access to the library free of charge. To do this OIL has to provide easier digital accessibility to our in-house, as well as, external data.

• A third major goal is to increase data availability, provide easier and faster access to the data and to continue to add new data to our collections.

The Board intends for this Capital Campaign to provide for the following items:

• Establish an endowment for the position of Library Curator.

• Storage for the preservation of critical older data and to begin the restoration process of data from older microfilm files.

• Pay for man-hours to scan hard copy and microfiche data into a searchable database.

• Pay for contract work to integrate the many completion card files into one collection.

• Establish 2 computer workstations complete with all the necessary software used in today’s earth science research and oil and gas exploration efforts.

• Provide for the extension of software licenses and upgrades to computer systems well into the future

• Compatible printing and plotting capability

• Provide members and registered residents with wireless internet access

• Proper wiring of the library and to make available to library users up to 5 laptop computers.

• Equipment for the conversion of paper and microfiche data to digital data files.

• Maintenance fund for this equipment

• General storage systems for data

• Budget for filing systems.

• On-site semi-private work areas for library users need to be set up.

• Upgrade maps whenever possible.

• Fund a membership to Drilling Info that will allow access for the library similar to an arrangement made between one of our associated libraries and DI.