Category Archives: Major Announcements

This is for very major news announcements that will post on the home page of the website. Please only administrators link to this category.

Tufts Data Rescue

From 1/20-1/23 Tufts University and the Open Geoportal Community conducted a sizeable U.S. federal data harvest. We surveyed Tufts faculty to identify those geospatial data most critical their teaching and research. We then conducted a curated harvest to back up potentially at-risk federal, environmental and social justice geospatial data and associated tabular data.  Currently we are at around 20 TB of data backed up on Tufts Research Data Storage Network.  This is an ongoing effort as we are continuing to harvest data daily. Please contact Patrick.florance@tufts.edu if you would like to participate or learn more.

Here is a summary of the Tufts OGP Data Rescue as of 3/1/2017

Other Data Rescue Efforts Around the Nation

Nationwide Data Rescue at Penn with Calendar of Events
Datarefuge.org – Penn CKAN repository

End of Term project

Environmental Data and Governance Initiative (EDGI)

Climate mirror

Azimuth climate data backup project:
Run by John Baez baez@math.ucr.edu

UNH Receives IMLS Award

Empowering the University of New Hampshire User Community with the Power of PLACE.

The University of New Hampshire Library and its partner, the Earth Systems Research Center, have been awarded a grant in the amount of $474,156 from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, National Leadership Grants for Libraries Program (Grant Award Number: LG-05-13-0350-13) to build PLACE, the Position-based Location Archive Coordinate Explorer.  PLACE will be a geospatial search interface that will use embedded geospatial coordinates to enable easier discovery of information that can be difficult to locate through text based searching. Through PLACE, via a click or delineation of a search polygon on a web map, users will zoom to a region and will locate all UNH Library collections whose geographic extents intersect.  Initially, PLACE will provide access to geographic collections focused on the region, but it will be flexible and expandable as collections grow. The project will provide users with access to these collections through a flexible visual interface and provide a toolkit for other institutions to implement in their geospatial collections. Ready access to embedded geospatial information in a flexible visual interface will contribute to the development of 21st-century skills by library users, such as visual, global, and environmental literacy.

The project will contribute to two open source communities: Open GeoPortal (OGP) and FEDORA.  Tasks to accomplish our goals include creating standards compliant metadata for prototype collections and ingesting digital objects into FEDORA, purchasing and configuring a dedicated server for our instance of OGP, and integrating OGP with the FEDORA Solr index to provide a basic level of OGP functionality.  We will build new tools not currently available in GeoPortal using Jscript and Jquery. The universal gazetteer tool will involve a common library of polygons, such as county boundaries, which will be available via pull down lists.  Time series data is important for assessing changes over time: a cross reference table and a time slider on the interface will make it easier for users to select datasets by time periods.  We plan usability studies throughout the project to optimize interface design, and enhancements for providing geospatial access to the unique geological fieldtrip guidebook literature, a feature supported in our needs analysis.

Contacts:
Thelma Thompson, Associate Professor & Government Information and Maps Librarian
(603)862-1132; thelma.thompson@unh.edu

Eleta Exline, Assistant Professor & Scholarly Communication Librarian
(603) 862-4252; eleta.exline@unh.edu

Michael Routhier, Information Technologist, Earth Systems Research Center
(603) 862-1792; mike.routhier@unh.edu

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Grant Awarded to Tufts

Tufts University has received an award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the development of The Open Geoportal Cloud Federation. As part of the award we will be developing the following components in the coming year:

1. Develop a working prototype for cloud-based, Automated Federated Solr Metadata Harvester supporting multiple metadata formats (1/2013-12/2013).

2. Develop of a formal organizational structure for the Open Geoportal Federation which includes:

A. Host a National Open Geoportal Summit to provide training and develop consensus agreement on roles and governance. Travel for selected attendees funded. (Summer/Fall 2013).
B. Develop the opengeoportal.org to provide collaborative capacity to manage application development and share best-practices (12/2012-2/2013).

New Metadata Toolkit under Development

Tufts University has acquired funding to develop an open source metadata clearinghouse toolkit: a cloud-based, light weight metadata authoring environment.  Our goal is to provide rapid guided metadata authoring. The site will employ controlled vocabularies from the Library of Congress API and the OGP thesauri. It will also facilitate the import and export of geospatial metadata records from the OGP cloud of metadata (currently around 40,000 metadata records). It will also provide a crosswalk to/from multiple metadata formats. It is being developed in collaboration with Harvard, MIT, and UC Berkeley.