Friday, November 30, 2012

Archiving Digital Maps

An excerpt and presentation from an academic paper on archiving digital maps:

 

I have been a member of the Geographic Information System (“GIS”) community in New York City, since the early 1990s when I was a real estate researcher at Price Waterhouse. In those days, except for certain Federal departments, like the US Census, geographic data was largely held by the institutions that created it. Datasets were static, finite and, until the advent of DVDs and the World Wide Web, difficult to share, due to their often massive file size and the slow speed of internet file transfer. The sharing that did happen was informal, occasional, and often blocked, inadvertently or deliberately, by agency policy or licensing terms that restrict third party distribution. Census data and commercial products, such as demographics tables from Sales & Marketing Magazine, were available at the New York Public Library on tape, microfilm and later on DVD, but more proprietary data sources were often obtained through expensive licensing agreements or barter and a network of “who you know.” The GIS user group, GISMO, formed in 1990, was one place where such sharing occurred.

GISMO was originally created as a software user network where GIS professionals shared information on GIS tools and applications and presented projects at informal bi-monthly meetings. At the time that GISMO was formed, NYC agency geographers were frustrated with the lack of centrality of geographic data at the City level. There was no common base map of New York City on which to overlay geospatial data and no City library where geospatial resources were archived and available for extensive employee use. To address this problem, GISMO offered the following data advocacy statement:


GISMO supports freer access to data through interaction between NYC area GIS users as well as the following long range initiatives:
  • Developing common electronic base maps for GIS users in NYC.
  • Facilitating the data distribution among city agencies and between the public and
    private sector.
  • Coordinating local information systems for synergy, economy, and accuracy.
  • Providing GIS resources to technologically isolated organizations.

In this paper, I will take a look at the access issues that led a group of geographers to work toward developing a centralized data repository for New York City and how these efforts were mirrored and extended at the national level. While I learned a lot about GIS metadata and software, I will focus more on policy issues around the management of geographic data collections and then discuss archiving management issues more generally. I will avoid delving deeply into political themes around data access and control, though they do have a role in the history of geographic data and how public release and archival decisions are made. I will present information on early data clearinghouses and website archives which provided examples for more robust archival programs at local and national institutions, including NYPL, the Library of Congress, Data.Gov and the NYC Open Data initiative. I will also look at the cost of data, economic limitations on access and the promise of open data.

Full paper (.DOC 145.9kb)