Frostburg State University, the Maryland Bureau of Mines (BOM), and the Maryland Power Plant Research Program have undertaken a joint, cooperative venture to collect, catalog, preserve, interpret, and provide access to the historical records of coal mining in Western Maryland, using GIS and geospatial databases. Consolidating, cataloging, and indexing these materials will be accomplished for the purpose of 1) providing for the public safety, 2) identifying subsidence prone areas, 3) facilitating ongoing environmental restoration efforts by BOM to mitigate the environmental impacts of pre-law (1977) historic coal mining, 4) facilitating studies for the use of power plant combustion products in mine restoration, and 5) aiding in the location and proximity of mine portals to proposed and/or existing wind turbine sites for determining bat habitats. Initial efforts in the proposed five-year project have focused on collecting maps, identifying critical data points for cataloging and indexing, identifying necessary equipment and supplies, and establishing workflow procedures. A geodatabase containing spatial and bibliographic data for mines is being constructed to provide access to the historical records. Georeferenced, vector point shapefiles are created using ArcGIS 8.3, and usually represent entries, shafts (if known), and/or the general location of a mine. Each point location is linked to the scanned image of the source map. Attribute tables for each point contain pertinent information specific to the individual mine. Using ArcCatalog, shapefiles are grouped together into layers, and organized by 1:24,000 USGS Quadrangle, watershed and mine type (surface or underground). Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) compliant metadata is created for the point coverages by quadrangle. ArcIMS, a web based GIS and mapping service, will enable users to perform environmental assessments such as pinpoint all abandoned mine sites within an impaired watershed, classify areas unsuitable for mining, identify potential subsidence prone areas, or integrate our data with other internet data sources for display, query, and analysis in a standard internet web browser.