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.
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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)
