Geospatial Librarian

This post provides a description of the ten facets found in GeoBlacklight and how they are populated in the Big Ten Academic Alliance geoportal.    Note: This information is subject to change as the geoportal project evolves. What is Faceting? Faceted searches are a way of helping a user narrow down information by selecting from predefined metadata subcategories. They constitute a cross between a browse and a search, because users can combine facets to create custom searches that were facilitated by the existence of selectable values. Faceting has become more popular among library catalogs and its introduction into the GeoBlacklight application reflects this trend.   One important issue for search interfaces that rely on faceting is metadata quality.  This system puts a greater onus upon cataloguers to provide consistent and complete metadata.  Variations in spelling and element usage will cause similar items to fail to be linked together.  Th...

Summary The Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal offers text, faceting, and map based search functionality. This post reviews how to search for items from the homepage and how to refine that search from the results page. Homepage Search Options There are three search options on the homepage:  text search box, category browse, and map search. 1. Text Search Box The first item below the banner is a general keyword search box.  The search will scan all of the text fields in the metadata record. 2. Category Browse Three categories have been placed on the homepage for browsing: Institution, Publisher, and Subject.  At the bottom of each category is the text more >>.  Clicking on this link will bring up an overlay box where the user can sort all of the items alphabetically or by number of entries. Full subject list obtained by clicking "more >>" 3. Map Search At the bottom of the page is a world map for geographic searches. ...

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...

Issue: Keywords in a group of records within GeoNetwork were too specific and not normalized Challenge: Editing each record individually would be time consuming, since many keywords would have to be deleting one by one.  Additionally, the keywords were grouped in sections and some can not be deleted easily from the interface. Our project's CSW update process was adding new keywords, but not deleting existing ones, nor could it address the messy structure of the keyword sections. Solution: Download records, delete entire keyword node using Oxygen, re-upload, perform a CSW update to insert new keywords. ----- Overview This post focuses on the utility in Oxygen for deleting a node in an XML file.  I decided to use this technique because I had group of ISO 19139 files where the keyword section was corrupted with multiple nests, and the keywords themselves were not aligned with our preferred metadata vocabulary.  Deleting the sections manually in GeoNetwork did not ...

On May 26, several task force members attended the first  UMGEOCON , the Upper Midwest Geospatial Conference.  This is a new regional conference that encompasses GIS professionals from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.  Jaime Martindale and Karen Majewicz gave a presentation about the metadata workflow for GIS resources. Here is a link to the presentation as Google Slides.