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September 2025 Program Status Update

BTAA Geoportal Video Tutorials: Step-by-Step Search Walkthroughs

To make the BTAA Geoportal even easier to use, we’ve launched a new series of video tutorials demonstrating common BTAA Geoportal search strategies applied to real datasets. These short walkthroughs show practical techniques for combining keywords, filters, and map-based searches to quickly locate the data you need.

Watch the full series on our YouTube Channel: @GeoBTAA

    The tutorial series includes:
  • Intro to the Geoportal – What it is and how to get started
  • Vector Dataset Search – Finding redlining maps for Pennsylvania cities
  • Historic Map Search – Exploring digitized campus maps from Big Ten universities
  • LiDAR Land Cover Search – Using Iowa’s 2009 dataset as an example

Designed for researchers, students, and librarians alike, these tutorials help users navigate the Geoportal more effectively and discover datasets with confidence.

Program Activities

Committees

  • Held kickoff meeting in September
  • Lead developer gave presentation on new technology stack goals and progress
  • Held open discussion of charter language, outreach priorities, and content strategies (Collection Blog; LibGuides best practices)
  • Next: Plan to review charter and goals for the coming year
  • Discussed indexing geospatial data from open-access ETDs in the Geoportal
  • Did not meet

Workgroups

  • Held a successful meeting with Minneapolis, who agreed to serve as our first data provider partner.
  • Shared highlights at the Program Team meeting that sparked a group conversation about opportunities and next steps
  • Developed a prototype for a data citation tool hosted on the GIN website
  • Discussed key elements of a data citations and reviewed best practices from other guides

BTAA Geoportal

Analytics Statistics

This month by the numbers

  • Visitors: 9,189
  • Visits: 10,703
  • Downloads: 536
  • Visits with download: 5.01%
  • Outlinks: 2,247
  • Visits with outlink: 20.99%
  • Num. searches: 1,204
  • Search keywords: 454
  • Pageviews: 24,510

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. relief
    3. Middle East
    4. pennsylvania
    5. cairo
    6. trail
    7. baltimore county
    8. allegheny county
    9. Tacoma
    10. Egypt


Collections

Total records as of October 1, 2025: 116,953

Harvesting Activities

Title Records added Records retired
2025-09-02 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 219 31
2025-09-09 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 45 61
2025-09-16 Scan ArcGIS Hubs 49 73
Reharvest Mapping Inequality 314 538
Reharvest Newberry Library 0 0
Datasets (USA and international 8012 2
Total 8639 705

Web Development

New Features or Enhancements

  • GeoBTAA API development in progress
    -- established a test suite (pytest)
    -- enhanced documentation (https://gin.btaa.org/ld/)
    -- Developing spatial facets
  • React user interface development in progress
    -- Added links and web services previews
    -- established test suite vitest)
    -- new admin view of test fixture records

More development details

Read the most recent development report for more details