This data was collected by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in New Mexico at both the New Mexico State Office and at the various field offices. This dataset is meant to depict the federal mineral (or subsurface) interest of land parcels within New Mexico. No attempt is made to depict the mineral interest of non-federal entities. BLM's Master Title Plats are the official land records of the federal government and serve as the primary data source for depiction of federal mineral interest lands. Auxilliary source are referenced, as well, for the depiction of federal mineral interest. Collection of this dataset began in the 1980's using the BLM's ADS software to digitize information at the 1:24,000 scale. In the mid to late 1990's the data was converted from ADS to ArcInfo software and merged into tiles of one degree of longitude by one half degree of latitude. These tiles were regularly updated. The tiles were merged into a statewide coverage. The source geodatabase for this shapefile was created by loading the merged ArcInfo coverage into a personal geodatabase. The geodatabase data were snapped to a more accurate GCDB derived land network, where available. In areas where GCDB was not available the data were snapped to digitized PLSS. This shapefile has been created by exporting the geodatabase feature class.