The Journal of Map & Geography Libraries published an article about the BTAA-GIN, "Sustaining a Spatial Collaboration: Leveraging Social Infrastructure to Support Technological Advancement in Geospatial Data Discovery." This article, authored by four Team Members, describes the BTAA-GIN, reviews our history to date, and lays out our future plans.
This month, we completed our 2023-24 program roadmap, "Revamping the BTAA GIN".
The purpose of this roadmap was to guide our transition from a “Project” to an ongoing “Program,” with an increased focus on the social infrastructure of our organization. We made strides in four key areas: Governance, Content Management, Asset Management, and Community Support.
The BTAA Geoportal now features a plugin that integrates the Allmaps georeferencing platform for scanned maps hosted via IIIF. For maps that have already been georeferenced, users will find a second tab on the item page that displays the map over a basemap. For maps not yet georeferenced, users can use a widget in the sidebar to open the map in the Allmaps interface.
We recently added five OpenIndexMaps for 19th century atlases of the Mississippi River. Now, researchers can use an index map within the Geoportal to find and select atlas pages based upon location.
We had the honor of being invited by Yale University Libraries to present our expertise in GeoBlacklight, OpenGeoMetadata, and the BTAA Geoportal to their Associate University Librarians. Our overview included development requirements, metadata strategies, collaboration successes, and our recommended priorities.
Our slides are below:
We are pleased to announce that Northwestern University has become a member of the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Information Network (BTAA-GIN). This addition to our network signifies a notable development in our efforts to enhance the collective resources and expertise available to our members.
We added one of our largest set of records this month: 8,605 records from the Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes, Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, University of Chicago ("CAMEL"). This unique collection contains a mix of gereferenced maps and satellite imagery of the evolving Middle Eastern landscape.