January saw the third annual Geo4LibCamp, a hands-on "unconference" meeting to share best-practices, solve common problems, and address technical issues with integrating geospatial data into a repository and associated services.
This year’s event, hosted at Stanford University, included nearly 50 attendees from 26 academic institutions and organizations. Highlights from Day 1 included the Keynote Address from the always inspiring Stace Maples, who described how the Stanford Geospatial Center has been able to aid international public health projects, and the plenary panel, Getting started and keeping momentum, with speakers from five institutions that have successfully set up geospatial repositories and/or discovery applications.
The featured speaker on Day 2 was none other than David Rumsey himself, who provided a wonderful walk through of the history of the San Francisco Bay area with maps ranging across hundreds of years. Rumsey also discussed his own history as a map collector and his predictions for the future of maps and geospatial archives.
After the presentations concluded, we held over a dozen unconference sessions on topics ranging from setting up technical infrastructure to wrangling geospatial metadata to sharing best practices for outreach and working with students.
Index maps were a big topic of discussion during the week as librarians and developers have been searching for better ways to display these digital finding aids for atlases and map series in a user friendly way. OpenIndexMaps, which uses a lightweight geojson format, has been recently enabled for GeoBlacklight and is a promising option. As opposed to relying upon bulky GIS web servers, a geojson can be easily hosted anywhere (such as GitHub) and can be used to provide an interactive index. Here is an example of the functionality in GeoBlacklight for a historical atlas:
Recap of Geo4LibCamp2017
Geo4LibCamp2018 Attendees
This year’s event, hosted at Stanford University, included nearly 50 attendees from 26 academic institutions and organizations. Highlights from Day 1 included the Keynote Address from the always inspiring Stace Maples, who described how the Stanford Geospatial Center has been able to aid international public health projects, and the plenary panel, Getting started and keeping momentum, with speakers from five institutions that have successfully set up geospatial repositories and/or discovery applications.
The featured speaker on Day 2 was none other than David Rumsey himself, who provided a wonderful walk through of the history of the San Francisco Bay area with maps ranging across hundreds of years. Rumsey also discussed his own history as a map collector and his predictions for the future of maps and geospatial archives.
After the presentations concluded, we held over a dozen unconference sessions on topics ranging from setting up technical infrastructure to wrangling geospatial metadata to sharing best practices for outreach and working with students.
Index maps were a big topic of discussion during the week as librarians and developers have been searching for better ways to display these digital finding aids for atlases and map series in a user friendly way. OpenIndexMaps, which uses a lightweight geojson format, has been recently enabled for GeoBlacklight and is a promising option. As opposed to relying upon bulky GIS web servers, a geojson can be easily hosted anywhere (such as GitHub) and can be used to provide an interactive index. Here is an example of the functionality in GeoBlacklight for a historical atlas:
Other Geo4LibCamp reviews:
Recap of Geo4LibCamp2017