NB This is a quick html translation of the original M$word documents, all formating is Andrew Atkinson's fault. If you have time to do something about it email him (archive 'at' wotcc.org.uk)
All significant British caves have been surveyed. Club librarians can usually turn up a plan of any given cave. However these paper plans have drawbacks.
Often they are not supported by cross-sections or profiles and are thus limited to two dimensions.
Often there is no link to the outside world; no surface topology,
Paper is a biodegradeable medium, which, as well as compromising its long term future renders it an unsuitable medium to take down a cave.
Prints are generally of a one-size-fits-all nature; the survey may have shrunk from its optimum scale in order to fit onto a printed page, and become downgraded in the process.
These vary with user.
The surveyor will want his own copy marking the position of survey stations, showing the centre line and various relevant bits of narrative.
An explorer or recreational caver requires a compacted print annotated with information on route finding, hazards and points where equipment will be needed.
A hydrologist requires a stream map; a paleontologist a plan showing sediments; a geologist a section and so on.
A survey is only one way of representing a cave.
Many scientific observations are made and publishedin a variety of forms.
There are also useful accounts of caves in many general publications.
Currently there is no means if integrating this information and this might be a useful secondary role of a database once created.
A paper plan is a static snapshot at a point in time, and can rapidly become dated since:-
Subsequent discoveries may change the cave configuration.
Two or more caves may become joined.
Caves themselves are dynamic and may be enlarged or truncated by natural processes
Accuracy and draughtsmanship may be improved.
Survey standards can change and technology can radically alter the way surveys are plotted and represented.
Any modification requires reference back to the original survey data and herein lies a major problem, for it is likely to be unavailable.
It seems to be the fate of most survey data to disappear:-
Early surveyors regarded the data as a discardable intermediate step towards producing a paper plot.
Widows throw out surveying notebooks.
PC disk crashes or upgrades can wipe-out data.
Surveyors lose interest, or move or cease caving and dump the data.
For those who are interested in data conservation there is no organisation that they can turn to which will guarantee indefinite data storage.
For many British caves there is thus no longer any record of where the survey stations or centre line are, which must be a matter of regret for anyone who has spent hours groveling with the end of a tape.
The upshot of all of this is that, although thousands of hours of effort have gone into cave surveying, nationally we enter the new millennium with a fragmented mass of survey plots which cannot readily be, validated or updated. At worst it means that if this generation does nothing to conserve the survey heritage then the next will have to commence a second survey.
This is why a national survey data archive is needed, and by this I mean the angles, distances and notes, not the plotted results. The archive would be a readily available cave by cave single source of aggregate survey and other data, to which ideally any caver/surveyor could contribute according to their knowledge and ability and which any interested person could use freely according to their need.