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GIS Day 2007
GIS Day 2007 was November 14 and was a smashing success, if we do say so ourselves.
A number of interesting presenters and posters were contributed by students and faculty from several different departments and research shops on campus. Most of the posters are permanently archived in our own GIS Day collection in Purdue Libraries' eScholar repository. (Alas, the podcast won't make it).

Please see the GIS Day page for information about next year's event, penciled in as a larger affair based on turnout this year.
GIS for Lunch
We are holding a series of informal brown bag lunches devoted to spreading and collecting news, information, tips, and issues surrounding GIS and spatial analysis on campus. These are easy-going, come-and-leave-as-you-please lunch hour sessions, probably one very two months, organized around a light agenda. There may or may not be a presentation each time by somebody who wants to draw attention to some developing project, technology, data source, story, or issue, but this probably won't even be necessary every time.

The first of these was held in BRNG 1248 on Friday, October 12, from 11:00 am to 12:30 pm (it went long). We discussed GIS Day 2007, a potential map-scanning/rectifying-on-demand project, a GeoInformatics course being co-developed by the Libraries and EAS slated for Spring 2007, and generally kicked around ideas about potential projects, campus resources, and gaps in collective knolwedge about GIS processing and resources.

The next session will be announced on the PurdueGIS Listserv and on this site's RSS feed. As before, any issues are welcome and don't even need to be submitted in advance (unless you want to).
Walk-ins and the GIS Lab
There is a four-seat lab in the EAS Library that is open throughout the day (8-5 daily). These are powerful machines with large monitors, attached scanners, and with network access to a printer/plotter, a color desktop printer, and an oversized map scanner. They feature a pretty full stock of purchased and open source software titles and utilities (ArcGIS Desktop among them, including several extensions and add-ons) and are available to walk-in patrons on a first-come, first-served basis.

The GIS Librarian is on site (EAS 2215E) and is available for assistance with the machines, their software, or the projects themselves (see below), as is the graduate assistant (schedule forthcoming).
Disc.Iso Software Download Site
To expedite the delivery of various GIS software titles to users on campus, we offer the Disc.Iso site. Here you can search for and read about much of the licensed software available to Purdue GIS users, and authenticated users can proceed to download either .iso images of the original discs (that can be burned to disc or mounted as a folder) or .tgz archives of those discs' contents (that can at least be mounted as a folder). More information is available at the Disc.Iso site, and requests for authentication can be sent to the GIS Librarian.
Consultations
The GIS Librarian is available for consultations by appointment throughout the year, including off-semester hours and interims. Project planning, data acquisition, analysis and visualization, and output are all supported. Anybody needing help with (or thinking about needing help with) a GIS-related project is encouraged to contact the GIS Librarian at any time.
Course Visits
Naturally, we would be thrilled to visit classes at Purdue and illustrate the benefits of GIS. Interested faculty are encouraged to contact us with requests either for a presentation or for more information about how GIS might apply to their courses.
Project Storing and Serving
Eventually, we intend to develop a mechanism (possibly already in place) and a protocol (not in place) whereby the work of researchers on campus can be archived and served by the Libraries with a full compliment of compliant metadata and full read-only access to interested researchers or the general public (including recruiters and others in charge of hiring well-skilled graduates). As a part of -- or compliment to -- ongoing University initiatives to capture, organize, maintain, and serve the valuable work of Purdue researchers and students, our plan to do the same for GIS datasets and related information products is ambitious, but indicative of the commitment libraries have to this valuable resource.
Learn from Us
As our program and this site get more and more developed, you'll be able to see more and more examples of how GIS is being applied to projects all across campus and indeed beyond. We encourage anybody with even a passing interest in GIS to contact us. We'd be happy to discuss what GIS might be able to do for you and can provide -- probably even with short notice -- examples of such.
Learn from Others
As part of our license agreement with ESRI, we can offer free access for all Purdue affiliates to the ESRI Virtual Campus modules. These online courses range from simple to advanced and are a great way to be led through common GIS processes. Please contact the GIS Librarian for codes that can be used to register for these courses.

Also, Purdue Libraries already owns over 40 books published by ESRI (usually its ESRI Press) that detail the use or concepts behind their software in addition to hundreds of titles on GIS more generally (including topics and methods that are non-software specific or specific to open source GIS software).
Superfund Buffer Course Module
2007-10-10
Students were being asked to collect, among many other data metrics, the population of a state that lived within 25 miles of a Superfund site for every year of a chosen ten year span. A decidedly spatial question, we built a series of models that were designed to illustrate the process (and inconsistencies and frustrations and oddities) of collecting data from disparate sources, preparing them to be synthesized in a GIS environment, and ultimately querying spatial and demographic data relative to one another.

Specifically, students were made to gather differently-formatted Census data from different sources and at different geographies, use block group popupulations for known decennial Censuses (1990, 2000) to estimate intercensal years, then collect up those block groups in maps of Superfund site buffers in order to garner that last, golden number: total population living within 25 miles of a Superfund site in any given year.

The resulting website and map application is up here and it includes a link to a fuller description of the process.
one of several models built to process data one of several troublesome sources students calculated intercensal pop. estimates ...then collected block groups within SF buffers
Vulcan Spot Check Maps
2007-08-20
In anticipation of the release of a new carbon emissions inventory by Dr. Kevin Gurney's Vulcan project, we're building an online mapping application that allows us to menuize their tabular output (in PostgreSQL). The application lets any user click-choose any table they're interested in seeing be rendered as a map and the application does the join, renders the map in MapServer, and tiles the output in ka-Map! for smooth, intuitive delivery.

The project is designed to be internal for now but may become part of the data release procedure.
main application with default map menu built from remote table inventory zooming to check individ. counties/cells xml overlay highlighting from Postgres subquery
Soil Survey Resurrection
2007-01-22
Purdue University Libraries is resurrecting a 1906 Soil Survey and mashing it with itself in order to add value, access, and interaction beyond the more traditional scan/describe/store model of collection recovery. It is an attempt to leverage the evolving technologies of librarianship (description, yes, but also text markup, web application-building, and GIS) toward the benefit of our users' maturing needs and expectations. A very alpha of this project's online app is up at gis.lib.purdue.edu/Soil/
slide from presentation to CNI digitization method online app pipes in eScholar object other content from disparate sources
Wabash River Aerial Photo Project
2006-12-15
This project publishes an interactive, GIS-based application that will allow anyone to view, navigate, and download historic (~1929) aerial photos and topographic maps of the Wabash River in Indiana. The maps were scanned by workers at the Erie Canal Museum, rectified by us here in The Libraries, and went up in May, 2007 using a new ka-Map interface. See the project site at http://gis.lib.purdue.edu/WabashRiver/
application window close up of application tools topo sample main context site here
"Environmental Project" Pt. II
2006-11-01
In some ways Pt. II was more of the same: a lot of database work, a whole lot of data preparation. Most notable here is that getting GIS support from the Libraries meant researchers didn't have to track down just the right road data to match to their input models and didn't have to investigate the origins of the data codes themselves. The results of this phase were presented to some fanfare at AGU in San Francisco, 2006.
exploded view of input layers example of two cells with point, road overlays frame of "24 hours over Ohio" animation frame of isometric view animation of Ohio
"Environmental Project" Pt. I
2006-08-08
The problem presented by this project was -- surprise -- how to combine, compare, and finally sum values from several different input datasets with several different types of geography. First, researchers extracted data by county. This is usually easy to match to a map given some attribute of a county (FIPS). But being added to those county data were additional extracted values (from a different database) that just so happened to be splayed out onto the earth in a grid.

So first we generated a grid to match the one that governed the database extract. Next we took the extract itself and matched it to that grid. This step alone immediately revealed spatial patterns within the data (some good, some indicating problems with the originating data that had to be worked out). With our grid ready, we took the db extract with county values and matched it to a county map layer.

This project involved a sizeable amount of data manipulation and management (mostly within the MySQL and Postgres database systems) just to get to this point. It turns out there was a whole lot more ahead of us. (Pt. II to come).
small-scale view of grid's resolution close up of the county-to-grid relationship Two Themes ArcScript in ArcView 3.3 classified, unsummed grid data
input specification for gridded db extract portion of gridded output over Utah finished, aggregated U.S. grid diurnal animation (animated gif)


Purdue Campus KMZ (Google Earth)
2006-08-11
The good people at Physical Facilities Engineering were kind enough to give up some extracts of their campus GIS data, specifically the buildings and roads of campus. The buildings were then extruded and exported to a KMZ file using KML Home Companion and they're now able to load into Google Earth. The extrusions here are all uniform, however, as Facilities does not maintain building-level elevations. The KMZ file is available for download here.
original campus shapefile made pretty and labeled within ArcMap KML Home Companion export finished Google Earth kmz


Field Survey Maps
2006-08-21
A team about to charge out into various communities in various cities throughout Indiana wanted maps detailing the boundaries and coverages of their assigned Census Blocks along with navigation aids like streets and landmarks. This is a rather common, simple use of GIS, and if the survey were perhaps a little more extensive I would recommened using the same GIS to process and analyze the results.
target blocks as submitted to the Libraries target blocks after preparation for input master of one county w/ target blocks single target block map


Custom Hillshades
2006-08-28
A professor wants fairly highly-localized shaded relief maps to use in class as transparencies. Most existing shaded relief data available off-hand is much too course for these target areas, so we go get higher-resolution DEMs from seamless.usgs.gov and generate hillshades of our own that turn out just fine.
SRTM extract from seamless.usgs.gov fairly high-res. DEM of one target area very important scaling factor completed hillshade to generate a transparency

Proceed to the Disc.Iso site.
What is GIS Again?
GIS (Geographic Information Systems) represent a suite of tools and processes (software, hardware, and their application) that take in geospatial data and put out visualizations, analyses, or otherwise processed versions of those data. Makes no sense? Imagine taking an old map of Indiana, laying over it a new map of Indiana, laying over that the most recent satellite or aerial photography of the state, and then for good measure some elevation data originally captured by NASA's Space Shuttle program goes below it all (in case later we want to go 3d with it all). That's how you start working with GIS. What happens next could almost literally run the gamut of academic work as we know it, from soil chemistry studies to historic reenactments to consumer behavior in retail spaces to suitability studies to traffic analysis to, no kidding, hula dancing.

See our recent projects or gallery for examples, contact us, or visit this Indiana Geographic Information Council (IGIC) page, this USGS page, or GIS.com for more information.
Why in a Library?
Because GIS is remarkably extra-disciplinary, or perhaps more accurately, interdisciplinary. Because so much information contains geographic attributes, GIS serves many, many fields of study very well, and is in fact especially-well suited for bringing disparate datasets together in ways not previously possible. One good example of this is your local 911 system. It collapses address, roadway, utility, communication, terrain, land ownership, and building data into one unified system that helps first responders know where they're going (communications, roadway data), get where they're going (roadway routing and cost analysis), handle emergencies once there (building blueprints, owner tracking), and transport victims to the most appropriate care facilities (geocoded hospitals) when they leave.

Similar conflagrations can happen in academia, where ecologists can meet civil engineers; historians can meet English majors; and almost anybody can meet their students somewhere within a GIS. It just so happens that the University Libraries, central as they are to the whole of the information universe on campus, are ideal places for these meetings to occur; there with the full support of practicing, professional librarians whose collective attention is trained on service and access.
Right. But Why in a Library?
A number of reasons:

  • academic libraries have traditionally been and still are hubs of information, training, intellectual freedom, and even technological resources for their campuses

  • by design libraries provide materials and resources to those for whom it would be illogical or expensive to provide for themselves; since GIS is so broadly applicable, it makes sense for a library to offer it to those departments, faculty, and students whose own departments don't already do so

  • librarians have proved themselves an invaluable agent in the complex, delicate negotiation between information and information seekers that exists in more complex, more delicate forms still today; librarians are translators, of sorts -- of need to resource -- and should be able to do so whether resource in question is a book or a tool

  • the vastness of the GIS world is crippling and overwhelming to anybody who cares to monitor and track it, even within a single campus; if anybody can be a centering, normalizing force in a GIS community, it should be a librarian

  • as GIS data proliferate, governments and agencies are struggling to meaningfully maintain its stores in perpetuity; local, library-based initiatives to store and serve valuable research input and output might ultimately prove a feasible, albeit always imperfect, model

  • libraries themselves are spaces for which spatial organization and structure and analysis are well-suited; books and materials exist within a very unique, but highly-ordered space within a library's walls. The power of GIS to visualize and measure known spaces can be applied to libraries (to the benefit of their users) in many of the same ways it is leveraged by city planners and engineers.
    		•
    Faculty & Staff
    Chris Miller, GIS Librarian
    Chiung-Shiuan Fu (Sherry), Ph.D. student, Geomatics
    Jae Sung Kim, Ph.D student, Geomatics Engineering
    email & Phone
    ccmiller @ purdue . edu
    765.496.9474
    Chat
    ccmiller@jabber.org (any time)
    Location
    2215E EAS Libray (CIVL)
    Hours
    GIS Lab open 8-5 daily

    Last update: February 19, 2007

    Prepared by: Purdue University Libraries