Membership in the Society reflects the different groups interested in addressing these challenges including commercial firms, academic institutions, government bodies, publishers and other related organizations, both national and international.
[5] Specific concerns included dissemination of hard-copy materials to working geologists, an index of field trip guidebooks and conference proceedings, review articles, services of state survey libraries, geological mapping, abstracting and indexing services, geological thesauri, and standardizing citations.
The assembled geology and science librarians, geologists, documentalists, editors and information specialists adopted a constitution and completed the organization of an independent group whose purpose would be to initiate, aid, and improve the exchange of information in the earth sciences through mutual cooperation and to deal with the many problems created by the explosion of literature in the geosciences, including a shortage of trained personnel to staff geoscience libraries.
The first officers were: Mark Pangborn as President, Harriet Smith as Secretary/President-elect, Harriet Long as Treasurer, and Ruth Bristol as “Past President.”[3] GSIS was founded to “improve the exchange of information in the geosciences.”[6] Over the years the particular concerns of the society have changed as the information needs of the members have changed.
GSIS and its members continue to address emerging information trends in the geosciences, including open access and other scholarly communications issues, such as copyright, author rights, and predatory publishers.