Univ. of Texas BEG Houston Research Center

The Houston Research Centerof the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas
The Bureau of Economic Geology of the University of Texas has a research facility in Houston located at 11611 West Little York Rd., west of Beltway 8 and south of US 290.
The BEG's Houston Research Center is a public facility for core research which was donated by BP. It has a full technical library (donated by Unocal), and three conference rooms.  30,000 sq ft of the 120,000 sq ft facility is the core layout room, office space, and meeting areas.  The remaining 90,000 sq ft houses over 500,000 boxes of geologic material (core, cuttings, thin sections, outcrop samples, and paleontology samples) all accessible to the public and searchable online. The HRC''s online database includes the entire BEG core holdings totaling 1.7 million boxes. 
But the HRC is more that just a core warehouse. It can serve HGS members by providing easy access to geologic material with two geologists on staff for assistance, providing a facility for short courses or society meetings, and a full geologic, geophysical, and engineering library with a technical librarian on staff. 
There have been a couple of write-ups on the facility in the HGS bulletin (April, 2003 and February, 2004.)  The attached brochure and the HRC description on the BEG website contain additional information about the HRC.