The Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia ­ Osservatorio Etneo (INGV ­ OE) hosts a collection of thin sections – thin slices of rock made for petrographic observation and chemical characterization under the microscope. Thin sections are from eruptive products of Etna, collected over the last 30 years for monitoring purposes. This collection is a resource that can be utilized by the INGV staff to support volcano monitoring as well as by researchers for investigating petrological processes and contributing to the understanding of the genesis of recent Etna magmas. To facilitate and encourage these activities we created a database, in the form of a Microsoft Excel™ spreadsheet with defined fields, designed to describe the key petrographic properties of samples cut into thin...