A collection of manuscript field notebooks, section books and field record cards containing detailed information gathered by Survey geologists (or other recognised geologists) from various sources as part of the mapping process. Examples include observations linked directly to field slips, borehole logs, sections and drawings and cover the United Kingdom. The field notebooks date from the 1840s until they were more commonly replaced by field note record cards (sometimes referred to as field cards or sheets) in the field. A digital index of the notebook collection was created in the 1990s and stored in the BGS corporate database. Some notebooks are held by the BGS Library and may not be included in the field notebook index. The field notebook index is an index into the hard-copy records themselves, and does not include detailed locality information or information about data held within the notebooks. The Happs / Hall mining index to field notebooks and the field notebook localities dataset contain more detail for select notebooks. The hardcopy notebooks can be viewed upon enquiry to the National Geoscience Data Centre at BGS.