A GIS Server for ACS Partners?

(this page is basically historical --see a first draft of a proposal contrived in early Jan 2000
and see whither it has wandered by 3 March)

>>> "Robert S. Whyte"  12/20/99 10:49PM >>>
Hugh,

Barbara tells me you might have an interest in the GIS server? Let me
know what the potential is -- thanks!

-Bob
--
Robert S. Whyte, Ph.D.                  "Unless someone like you
Director of Environmental Programs      cares a whole awful lot,
Associated Colleges of the South        nothing is going to get better.
1975 Century Blvd., NE Suite 10         It's not."
                                                  

From: 	Hugh Blackmer
To:	Whyte, Robert S.
Date: 	12/21/99 10:15AM
Subject: 	Re: [ACS-GIS] gis conference call

Hi Bob,

Yes, I think we're very interested.  We're teetering on the brink of 
getting a T3 line (which would make serving to ACS partners much more 
practical), and I'm told that we could add 3 36G drives to our Miley 
server (the ACS graphics server --a lot cheaper than buying a whole new 
box) to give effective 72 G plus safety of RAID backup. The issues of 
acquiring and organizing data will probably necessitate a bunch of 
consulting with other institutions that run GIS servers, but that would 
be lots of fun

CC:	Blackburn, John;  Brown, Barbara;  Knudson, Jeff

We need to figure out just what the implications of this might be, including data acquisition, curation, distribution, interface, connection to Core initiatives, linkage with present and future course and program developments at ACS institutions... just for starters. I see the project as part and parcel of several things I've been working on, indeed as a means to make some of those things into realities.

We need to know a lot more than we do at present about how others have set up and run GIS servers, since there are some pretty distinctive problems (like gigantic files to be moved, what the search interface looks like [which is closely related to who the expected users are, and how much they can be presumed to know]...

We want to avoid unnecessary duplication, provide authoritative and well-documented sources for spatial metadata, coordinate the efforts to develop the pedagogical potentials of GIS, and so on... )

The Florida Data Directory seems an outstanding model.

Libraries, once custodians of print on paper, find themselves responsible for access to (and, often enough, user training in) an expanding range of digital information: images, sound, web documents, databases, GIS coverage, and the hardware and software to retrieve, display and manipulate these resources.

How big can we think as we imagine a GIS Server? It's arguable that an ACS effort with GIS needs a Center, but in fact not very much of that needs to be bricks-and-mortar or personnel or real estate. It's a virtual construct that happens to serve information from one point --but its community spreads from Texas to Florida to Virginia to Kentucky... A GIS Server could serve as a testbed for the evolution of electronic collaboration among ACS institutions. I suggest that such a Server would give us the capability to do several things:

• host an Internet Map Server to distribute the work ACS people do with GIS --to serve stuff that isn't already available to ACS abnd the wider public

  (An example might be the Maple Flats collaboration, on the sinkhole ponds in Augusta County, which involves W&L Biology and Geology, the Forest Service, other Virginia institutions --an exemplary collaboration, for which we're developing a database/GIS application)

• to coordinate (manage, curate, train, etc.) the collection and distribution of metadata for ACS efforts in the realm of GIS; and keep a central automated log of the use of GIS materials
• to handle licensing and distribution of datasets for ACS, and to accumulate and distribute to ACS institutions coverage like Remote Sensing data (viz: LANDSAT data), Digital OrthoQuads, other expensive digital data that can serve common research interests. Such material shouldn't need to be duplicated --though researchers might wish to keep local copies. But large-scale datasets (global, regional, etc.) might appropriately reside on a single ACS server
• to experiment with a common electronic tutorial and support system, to teach GIS skills asynchronously. Is there a possibility for collaboration with ESRI as a demo site, perhaps distributing ESRI training materials?
• to be a 'portal' for Digital Earth projects? and/or become a Geospatial Data Clearinghouse node for material on the South? Connect with regional/state/local agencies (like the Florida Data Directory), on the model of ACS partnerships with ICPSR?

  (each ACS institution is in a state that has some level of GIS activity --but what are the governmental and academic efforts, and how could they be linked together?

• to support development and promulgation of transdisciplinay GIS in the context of undergraduate liberal arts education
• to host ACS collaborative projects on the South, based on data and imagery accumulated on and dispersed from the server, and collaborative data-based courses in, e.g., Global Studies, on the model of the collaborative ACS Vietnam course

• Map Libraries on the World Wide Web from the Borchert Library at University of Minnesota
• University of Ottawa
• Princeton University Digital Map and Spatial Information Center (see also their Data and Statistical Services)
• Indiana University Electronic Resources in the Geography & Map Library (the Master List of Electronic Products is a nice model for brief metadata)
• Map and Geographic Information Center at University of Connecticut
• University of Virginia Geospatial and Statistical Data Center
• GenWeb U.S. Digital Map Library (map images, a glorious project)
• University of Michigan
• Alexandria Digital Library Project at UC Santa Barbara
• GIS Data Sets from Cal State Hayward
• Starting the Hunt ("Guide to Mostly On-Line and Mostly Free U.S. Geospatial and Attribute Data" from University of Arkansas --an amazing compendium)
• GIS and Archaeology Internet Resources and Publications (a lot of links)
• Digital Spacial Data University of Colorado (describes ESRI datasets)
• Sites with Data for GIS or Mapping from University of Waterloo
• earthsensing.com (an extensive list of free datasets... including Nova Scotia geology --see "Datasets for Cartography Projects")
• Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research at University of Iowa --an example of a local catalog of GIS coverage
• CIESIN World Data Center (of particular interest for Global Studies, but see also the Mexico datasets)
• Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) Geospatial Data Clearinghouse information resource page (re: how to set up a node). See FGDC home page, a list of Websites Associated with Clearinghouse Participants, and also Douglas Nebert's Status of the National Geospatial Data Clearinghouse on the Internet for an overview of server architecture
• K-12 Node

Digital Libraries reading list (Samantha Hastings)

Digital Libraries and Projects of the University of Michigan ("The following are current libraries and projects of the University of Michigan developing the idea of a Digital Library. Some of these projects are just getting underway and are very incomplete.")

Berkeley Digital Library Project

NSF Digital Libraries Initiative

An Operational Social Science Digital Data Library (Harvard proposal, 1998)

Historic USGS Maps of New England (JPG images from University of New Hampshire)

Digital Atlas of Boston

Digital Atlas of California

Both of the above part of a larger project: Digital Atlas of the United States (William Bowen)