Skip to content

BTAA-GIN Guiding Principles

Our Mission

  • To support the geospatial research community by making resources easier to find and to foster connections among geospatial library professionals through our collaboration.
    • Our program aims to support the geospatial research community by building and maintaining a collective open-source spatial data infrastructure featuring metadata optimized for spatial discovery platforms.
    • We foster connections among geospatial library professionals, the Big Ten Academic Alliance, and the BIG Collection by sharing expertise and utilizing collective resources while cultivating a culture of deep collaboration and interdependence.

Our Values

Collaboration & Connection

  • Provide a centralized resource discovery platform to connect data creators, providers, and consumers.
  • Provide a collaborative social infrastructure for librarians and geospatial specialists.
  • Create opportunities for engaging in joint research and sharing scholarly outputs.

Diversity, Equity, & Accessibility

  • Lower barriers to accessing geospatial data across a wide range of communities.
  • Create educational resources fostering geospatial literacy.
  • Strive to identify resources that represent diversity in topics, geographic regions, time periods, communities, and languages.

Stewardship & Sustainability

  • Invest in open-source technology and communities.
  • Share metadata best practices and schema development.
  • Champion initiatives to preserve and archive digital geospatial assets.

Our Vision

To preserve and share at-risk digital geospatial assets by building a complete spatial data infrastructure.