Strategic priorities

Background

2025 marked BTAA-GIN’s tenth year. In November, the network held its first in-person retreat in seven years, a two-day gathering in which members reviewed the network’s first decade and recommitted to current initiatives.

The retreat opened with near-term priorities for 2025–2026 — the annual GIS conference, the data curation initiative, and the Geoportal relaunch — with committees identifying how they could best support that work. From there, members turned to broader challenges and opportunities facing the geospatial and academic library fields, and identified the priorities below to guide BTAA-GIN’s work from 2026 through 2028.

Priorities

1. Build curated collections of historical geospatial data
   This priority will expand the Geoportal’s historical holdings through three parallel efforts: cataloging existing historical resources, hosting collections that currently lack a stable home, and digitizing historical materials, such as maps and planning documents, into new geospatial data.

2. Create a shared B1G cartographic collection
   This priority builds on a 2019 commitment by BTAA library leadership to a shared collective collection, which has so far focused mainly on monographs and serials. The aim is to bring the Geoportal’s geospatial search capabilities to paper cartographic collections, piloting the approach across several member institutions and a defined set of material types.

3. Support student success and learning at all stages
   This priority aims to help GIN members share student employment practices and resources across the network, including position postings and training materials. The work includes an assessment component, gathering feedback from GIN members and student employees on how these resources are used.

4. Expand leadership in open source
   This priority aims to strengthen BTAA-GIN’s technical infrastructure and metadata quality as the foundation for a community-governed, open geospatial metadata catalog. Year 1 work focuses on the network’s own API, codebase, and data, with broader adoption beyond BTAA-GIN tested in later years.

How We Work

Strategic priority work runs on a longer timeline than committee work. Priority working groups are not committees, and they are not expected to produce outputs on a committee schedule. Their charge is to think carefully, decide deliberately, and execute over a three-year horizon. These tracks run alongside ongoing committee work.

The work follows a phased cycle:

Phase 1: Due Diligence Assess the landscape — what exists, what is needed, what the risks and opportunities are. The goal is an honest assessment of the space, not a tactical plan.

Phase 2: Planning Following a formal charge from the Coordination Committee, the group develops a plan grounded in Phase 1 findings, defining its goals, milestones, and how success will be measured.

Phase 3: Execution Carry out the plan. Report progress at regular intervals and adapt as needed.

All four priority groups have completed Phase 1 and will begin Phase 2 planning in September 2026.