This is a collection of materials, material sets, site improvements, and material processes, stored within your current project that you or a colleague have created within the project. These are the materials, and material processes, that can be accessed from a variety of commands in the software.

The external libraries that you create will ideally contain many predefined materials, material sets, site improvements and material processing on which to base your project materials, material sets, site improvements and material processing. Copy them into your project library so you can customize them to the specific materials to be used at your job site. The items in project library remain independent of the items in the external library from which they were created.

This is a collection of materials, material sets, site improvements and material processes that are stored in an .mxl file external to your project. You can create and open (one at a time) an unlimited number of external libraries.

External libraries can be shared among colleagues so that your company uses predefined uniform materials, material sets, site improvements and material processing with consistent properties. You will all be able to expand and edit those definitions as the need arises.

The program comes with a sample external library located at:

C:\Program Files\Trimble\Trimble Business Center\Support\iv\Trial Materials and Site Improvement Library.mxl

Note: The default sample library is meant only to be a hypothetical example. Trimble makes no assertions that the materials and site improvements in it are realistic.

This category is for naturally occurring soil and rock materials. As such, it allows you to specify how you prefer to enter and calculate shrinkage, haul bulkage, and haul compaction values.

This category is for all other types of materials and site improvements that do not require the calculation of shrinkage, haul bulkage, and haul compaction values.