Geo4LibCamp 2018

Stanford University held its second Geo4LibCamp from January 29th through February 2nd. Yale University was represented by Yue Ji, Senior Programmer Analyst in Library IT, Rebecca Hirsch, Head of Beinecke Library’s Digital Services Unit, and Miriam Olivares, GIS Librarian for the Center for Science & Social Science.

Geo4LibCamp is a practical hands-on meeting, bringing together those building repository services for geospatial data. The camp is characterized as an “unconference” for being highly customized around participant’s suggested topics although there are scheduled sessions as well. The goal is to share best-practices, solve common problems, and address technical issues with integrating geospatial data. Approximately 75 attendees from over 45 institutions, predominately academic research libraries, attended.

GeoBlacklight is part of a larger effort to provide library services, such as discovery services and metadata, to geospatial data users. Yale University Library has a high-level goal of implementing GeoBlacklight for map-based collections such as the Connecticut Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, non-rare maps from the collections housed at CSSSI, and other rare maps from the collections of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Currently, all work is in the exploratory phase. The Library is looking to form a Geographic Information Systems Advisory Committee that will provide oversight and direction for this service offering.

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