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August 2025 Program Status Update

Welcome to Our New GIN Members!

We’re excited to welcome three new members to the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Information Network.

Chelsea Nestel, GIS Librarian at the University of Oregon, brings expertise in cartography, geospatial education, and design. With a PhD from UW–Madison, Chelsea offers workshops, consultations, and contributes actively to international cartographic communities.

Brendan Whyte joins the University of Chicago as Map Curator and Head of the Map Collection. Formerly with the National Library of Australia, Brendan supports campus-wide use of maps in research and instruction, promoting geospatial thinking across disciplines.

Anna Rohl is the new Map Curator at the University of Michigan’s Clark Library. She supports collection development, research, instruction, and public outreach, drawing on her background in history and library science.

Please join us in welcoming Anna, Chelsea, and Brendan. We’re thrilled to have them on board and look forward to their contributions to the GIN community!

[caption: Left: Chelsea Nestel, GIS Librarian at the University of Oregon; Center: Brendan Whyte, Map Curator, University of Chicago; Right: Anna Rohl, Map Curator, University of Michigan]

Program Activities

Committees

  • Did not meet as all committee work was wrapped in June.
  • New committee members met to confirm date/time, determine representative for Coordination Cmte, and finalize posting of Geoportal demo playlist.
  • New committee members met to confirm date/time, determine representative for Coordination Cmte, and to review the charter.
  • Did not meet.

Workgroups

  • Reviewed draft data provider partnership agreement
  • Consulted GIN members for city contacts and have set a prioritized list of partner cities to approach first.
  • Shared the final GIS Service Model Survey Report with all GIN members.
  • In Sept Program Team meeting, will share highlights with the goal of sparking a group conversation about opportunities and next steps.
  • Conducted a literature review in preparation for research and publication.

BTAA Geoportal

Analytics Statistics

This month by the numbers

  • Visitors: 6,097
  • Visits: 7,067
  • Downloads: 442
  • Visits with download: 6.25%
  • Outlinks: 1,790
  • Visits with outlink: 25.33%
  • Num. searches: 1,365
  • Search keywords: 467

Unique visitors by month

More stats

See full statistics on our Analytics Dashboard

What Users are Looking for

  • Top internal keyword searches

    1. Sanborn
    2. Yemen
    3. Georgia USA
    4. aerial photos
    5. south Carolina USA
    6. conservation
    7. pennsylvania


Collections

Total records as of August 1, 2025: 109,345

Harvesting Activities

Title Records added Records retired
Humanitarian Data Exchange 2398 143
MN GeoCommons 2 3
Static sites 0 950
Socrata portals 491 450
ArcGIS Hubs 343 0
Total 3234 1556

Note

We overhauled several processes this month: This included new harvesting python scripts and retiring many older records.

Web Development

New Features or Enhancements

  • Created new BTAA GIN subsite to document our development of the new API and our Linked Data profiles: https://gin.btaa.org/ld/
  • Geoportal: Improved facet order for GBL Admin workflows, streamlined data exports for Tableau, and added GeoJSON support to asset uploads and to the ItemViewer.

More development details

Read the most recent development report for more details