Geospatial Librarian

The Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Data Project (formerly CIC Geospatial Data Discovery Project) has launched the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal , built with GeoBlacklight . This project is collectively managed by a task force of librarians and geospatial specialists at ten research institutions from across the Big Ten Academic Alliance . These institutions have collaboratively aggregated and edited thousands of metadata records from multiple GIS data clearinghouses, FTP sites, and library catalogs. Background The Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Data Project began in 2015 to provide discoverability, facilitate access, and connect scholars across the Big Ten Academic Alliance to geospatial data resources. The project’s current outputs include a public geoportal , a harvestable collection of well over 3000 geospatial records in a uniform metadata standard , and workflow documentation .   The GeoBlacklight Choice A few months after the pro...

Our geoportal is live! After many months of collaborative metadata wrangling, the  Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Data Project (formerly CIC Geospatial Data Discovery Project) has launched the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal , built on the GeoBlacklight application. Nine institutions have contributed to the project by harvesting metadata records from multiple GIS data clearinghouses, FTP sites, and library catalogs. As of this writing, our geoportal provides discovery and access to nearly 2,800 records, including downloadable datasets, web services, and scanned maps.   All of the metadata records in the geoportal are also available on OpenGeoMetadata.

The GeoBlacklight schema is an extension to Dublin Core specifically for geospatial records. This schema was described by its creators, Darren Hardy and Kim Durante, in the 2014 Code4Lib article, " A Metadata Schema for Geospatial Resource Discovery Use Cases ." File Transformations Typically, geospatial librarians who wish to create GeoBlacklight JSON files are generating them from existing records in other metadata standards. This can be accomplished with XSLTs that transform the records. Here are links to XSLTs for different standards: XSLTs written by Kim Durante FGDC to GeoBlacklight ISO 19139 to GeoBlacklight MODS to GeoBlacklight XSLT written by Kevin Dyke ISO 19139 (GeoNetwork) to GeoBlacklight ============================== Screenshot of customized instance of Omeka - item edit page. Form Based Editor for GeoBlacklight For some workflows, a form based editing tool might be preferred for creating GeoBlacklight metadata.  This is t...