ABSTRACT
The very water chemistry results that are keyed into a local database have probably been keyed into other computers at the laboratory. Groundwater chemistry databases must take into account repeated sampling of the same site. Because of this, a simple well identification number is not enough to distinguish one sample from another. In the long run, groundwater chemistry data are more easily aggregated when a common file format is adhered to. The Environmental Protection Agency STORET system is likely to become the standard for shared groundwater chemistry data. If faced with data entry from massive amounts of paper reports, the purchase of scanners should be considered. Scanners and optical character recognition (OCR) software make it possible to electronically read groundwater chemistry results from laboratory reports into a data file. A scanner reduces the paper image to a pattern of dots, and OCR software converts the patterns of dots into letters and numbers.
