Welcome to the Gilles O. Allard Economic Geology collection, part of the University of Georgia Museum of Natural History holdings. The Allard Collection was donated to the museum in 1992 by Gilles Allard, and curation is nearing completion. The collection contains samples suites from more than 250 deposits/districts on six continents, including many world-class systems. As recently pointed out by Peter Laznicka in the April 2004 SEG newsletter, literally thousands of world class mineral deposits are now inaccessible, such that the only remaining samples from these systems are those which have been collected and curated by those of us who have visited these mines.
During his 50 year career as an explorationist and professor of Economic Geology, Gilles was always in the field, and invariably returned with wonderfully complete suites of rocks from a myriad of ore deposits. Gilles has always believed in looking at ore deposits as more than just ore, such that his sample suites always contain, in addition to ore samples, many samples of representative alteration as well as unaltered host rocks.
Gilles is now retired, which means he arrives at his office at 8 and leaves at 4 instead of 5! He is the recipient of the Duncan Derry medal of the GAC, the A.O. Dufresne award of the CIM, the Grand Prix de Mérite award of the AGGQ, and the Jean Descarreaux award of the AEMQ. He is a director and Vice President of Exploration for Lac Doré Mining Inc (subsidiary of Mackenzie Bay International), and still is in the field as much as possible, attends professional meetings, and gives lectures. He and his wife Bern still live in Athens.
The Allard collection curation effort is coordinated by Doug Crowe, currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology. Support for the decade long curation of the collection has been provided by the UGA Museum of Natural History in the form of student interns.
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