Keynote

In August of 2024, the UW became one of the newest members of the Big Ten. Being in the Big Ten means that the UW has the opportunity to participate in the Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA), an organization of collaboration that advances academic missions, shares expertise, leverages resources, and fosters collaboration on innovative programs. One of the BTAA initiatives is the BTAA Geospatial Information Network (GIN).

The BTAA-GIN is a collaboration of library affiliated individuals from the BTAA universities whose aim is to support geospatial researchers, make connections, and advance open-source geospatial tools. The GIN has two primary foci: Technical Infrastructure (geoportal, open-source community contributions and activities) and Social Infrastructure (professional collaboration opportunities, annual GIS conference, shared educational resources).

The BTAA geoportal aims to increase discovery of geospatial resources through a search and discovery application containing aggregated metadata records of maps, GIS data, web services, and more from sources related to the regions of BTAA institutions. Currently, the BTAA geoportal hosts over 100,000 records. The rest of this presentation consists of a live demonstration of the geoportal.