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May 2025 Program Status Update

BTAA-GIN Poster Presented at ACRL 2025: Sustaining a Spatial Collaboration

Poster presented at ACRL 2025: ‘Sustaining a Spatial Collaboration’ by Mattke, Majewicz, and Tickner

At the 2025 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Conference in Minneapolis, BTAA-GIN members Ryan Mattke, Karen Majewicz, and Amanda Tickner presented a poster highlighting the program’s evolution and the social infrastructure that underpins its long-term success.

Titled Sustaining a Spatial Collaboration: Leveraging Social Infrastructure to Support Technological Growth, the poster traces the development of BTAA-GIN from an informal network into a nationally recognized initiative. It emphasizes that while technological innovation—such as the BTAA Geoportal—has been critical, the program’s staying power lies in the strong, collaborative community built across institutions.

Key Themes

  • Trust, shared governance, and cross-institutional relationships as foundations for sustainable growth
  • Real-world lessons from maintaining open-source infrastructure across diverse academic environments
  • The evolving role of libraries in advancing geospatial research and discovery

Next Steps
The themes explored in the poster are shaping current priorities as BTAA-GIN prepares to redesign the geoportal and move into its next strategic phase. These insights will help ensure that both the technology and the community supporting it continue to grow together.

Program Activities

Committees

  • Held retrospective discussion on April Data Rescue sprint with Tech and Knowledge Cmtes.
  • Next steps: Working to get the BTAA-GIN listed as a “maintainer” in the Data Rescue Project and to add three records to their dataset tracker: NOAA Heat Watch, NCES Edge Hub site, HUD Hub site.
  • Completed a series of video walkthroughs of the Geoportal for discovering and opening resources that demonstrates all of the search features and filters. Next step is sharing them with the full GIN.
  • Summer plan is to update slides for introducing the Geoportal to classes.
  • Collaborated to draft a transition document to provide to incoming co-chairs and members on key priorities: Knowledge Committee as a whole, Services Models group, and Geospatial Data Citation group.
  • Planned committee membership transition (current commitments through June 2025).
  • Reviewed Geodata Curation Plan working group charge and timeline.
  • Considered Quarterly newsletter, Coordinates, editorial calendar and process for committees to showcase work.

Workgroups

  • Reviewed charge and made a call for additional members in May Program Mtg
  • Kick-off planned for late June
  • Launched survey and conducting ongoing data analysis with a report due this summer
  • Members will determine the future of the group and open a call for additional interest
  • Did not meet

BTAA Geoportal

Analytics Statistics

This month by the numbers

  • Visitors: 6,911
  • Visits: 7,789
  • Downloads: 538
  • Visits with download: 6.91%
  • Outlinks: 1,684
  • Visits with outlink: 21.62%
  • Num. searches: 2,210
  • Search keywords: 648
  • Pageviews: 17,817

Unique visitors by month

More stats

See full statistics on our Analytics Dashboard

What Users are Looking for

  • Top Google searches leading to the Geoportal

    1. btaa geoportal
    2. sanborn maps
    3. india subnational administrative boundaries
    4. franklin county school district map
    5. chester county parcel search
    6. nj school district map
    7. fire insurance map
    8. oakland county mi parcel viewer
    9. evansville city limits
    10. milwaukee school district map

  • Top internal keyword searches

    1. Sanborn
    2. Forest
    3. Agriculture
    4. Salmon
    5. Geology
    6. Iowa
    7. Landcover
    8. Bass
    9. Yemen
    10. Fire


Collections

Total records as of June 1, 2025: 106,316

January Harvesting Activities

Title Records added Records retired
2025-04-29 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 194 222
2025-04-08 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 123 124
2025-05-13 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 223 235
2025-05-20 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 687 174
2025-05-27 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 1490 47
Hoosier Data (01d-04) 2025 0 0
Minnesota Geospatial Commons (05a-01) March 2025 14 0
New Oregon open data portals 4 0
New Washington state open data portals 19 0
PASDA (08a-01) Q2 2025 23 46
Reaccession UW Milwaukee OpenGeoMetadata repository 79 0
Reharvest edu.wisc 5c87a0e commit 27 0
Reharvest Humanitarian Data Exchange (99-1400) Q2 2025 472 1982
Socrata portals harvest Q2 2025 0 0
Unpublish Covid-19 dashboard collection 0 16
Total 3355 2846

Web Development

New Features or Enhancements

  • GeoBlacklight v4.4.3 published to RubyGems, including minor fixes and maintenance updates.
  • Refactored BTAA OpenGeoMetadata API to support a service-based search model.
  • Began reviewing IIIF APIs to inform the development of a formal v1 API specification.
  • At Geo4LibCamp, presented a well-received talk on the OGM API and led an interactive workshop on AI-powered coding tools.

More development details

Read the most recent development report for more details

Priority Projects Update

Refer to our Priority Projects board.