72 GEOLOGICAL SURVEYS free-standing science council, and the BGS is part of the Natural Environment Research Council, a non-ministerial government department The most extreme development of this kind is the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Ltd in New Zealand, which is a limited liability company Some of the state surveys in the United States have no organizational links with government, but are attached to universities Funding Most geological surveys are funded entirely or mainly by a direct grant from government, and some are prohibited by law from being involved in commercial activity Others, particularly in Europe, are semicommercial in their mode of operation Until 1994, The BRGM in France owned and operated a mining company fully commercially, though no funding was transferred from mining to the survey activity Since 1973, the British Geological Survey has derived most of its income from commissioned research for government departments other than the supervisory one, and in the past decade, by an increasing amount of commercial activity This pattern is repeated in many other countries, and by 2001 nine European surveys received less than 70% of their income as a direct grant from government The lowest percentage grant from government: the lowest being Iceland, with only 30% The balance in these surveys is made up of income earned from the European Union research grants, some from the private sector, but mostly on commission from various government departments The Council for Geoscience in South Africa is divided into business units and its commercial freedom extends to allowing it to own and run hotels Associations and Resources Geological surveys throughout the world have banded together to form loose, common-interest groups Among these are the International Consortium of Geological Surveys (ICOGS); the Commonwealth Geological Surveys Forum (for countries in the British Commonwealth); the Forum of the European Geological Surveys Directors (FOREGS), which arose out of the Western European Geological Surveys (WEGS, founded in 1973); the Association of the Geological Surveys of the European Union (EuroGeoSurveys), a lobbying group to act on behalf of the geological surveys within the European Union; the Asociacio´ n de Servicios de Geologı´a y Minerı´a Iberoamericanos (ASGMI), which consists of the geological surveys of Spain, Portugal, and Latin America; and the Coordinating Committee for Offshore and Coastal Geoscience Programmes in South-east Asia (CCOP), which contains all the geological surveys of the region, though membership is not exclusive to them Information about geological surveys is dispersed Some geological surveys have their own written histories, which can be acquired directly from them or through a library In most cases, the best information is obtained through survey/association websites Three groups maintain gateway sites that can be used to access geological survey information: the British Geological Survey, at www.bgs.ac.uk/geoportal; the Open Directory Project, a citizen-editor/contributor database project, at www.dmoz.org/Science/Earth Sciences/Geology/Organizations; and McCully Web, at www.mccullyweb.com Other sources include newsletters of the International Consortium of Geological Surveys and publications of the Forum of the European Geological Surveys Directors See Also Colonial Surveys Geological Field Mapping Geological Societies Further Reading The report on the symposium meeting on the Organization of Geology Overseas, in the Proceedings of the Geo logical Society of London, No 1633, Sept 1966, gives a good account of the origin of geological surveys in Australia, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, France, the United States, and the former USSR