GIS at Columbia University Friday, May 6 th 2005 Speakers: Doug Miller Jeremiah Trinidad

What is GIS?  A systems of hardware, software, data, people, organizations, and institutional arrangements for collecting, storing, analyzing, disseminating information about areas of the earth

What do people use GIS for?  Maps –Illustrations –Documentation –Advocacy  Data analysis –Distance and proximity measures –Environmental models  Web based applications

GIS at Columbia  Where? –Departments –Labs –Classrooms  What kind of software –ESRI ArcGIS, ArcView –MapInfo –MultiSpec

Academic Quality Fund (AQF)  History – Interdisciplinary Collaboration  Who’s involved  Webpage  Summer Fellows  StartGIS  Metadata

AQF Summer Fellows Program Designed to foster spatial research and interdisciplinary communication among social-science graduate students.  Course module and curriculum development  Bibliography and resource list compilation  Individual Research

Summer Fellows  Anthropology – Heather Atherton  Economics – Francesco Brindisi  GSAPP – Michelle McEwen  Journalism – Laura Forlano  Political Science – Jeronimo Cortina  Public Health – Cynthia Golembeski  Sociology – Emily Bernstein  Social Work – Amanda Geller  Teachers College – Heather Schwartz

StartGIS Project  Grad Assistant jointly managed between ISERP & the Libraries  Help with creating short term mapping & spatial analysis  Available to faculty, graduate students, and other Columbia/Barnard researchers

StartGIS Project  Who has used the service? –Economics –East Asian Languages and Cultures –Middle East Institute –Political Science –Sociology –Social Work –Weatherhead East Asian Institute  What are they using it for? As part of the AQF grant, free GIS support was offered to help people start using GIS in their research

Tanisha Fazal  Death and survival of states in the international system  Mountainous areas and border conflict

Lou Cristillo  Muslims in New York Project for the Middle East Institute

Metadata  What is metadata? –Data about data  Using FGDC metadata standard  Urban Planning and Libraries creating metadata for spatial layers  Goal – a spatial metadata catalog

GIS Workshops  Attendance  Audience  Topics  Process  Speakers  Results  Requests

GIS Librarians Professional Meeting  When was it?  What schools attended? –Yale, University of Maryland, Cornel, MIT, Brown, NYPL  What did we talk about? –Comparison of programs and services –How GIS offered in the Libraries fits in with whole campus –Problems and challenges faced

GIS Librarians Professional Meeting  What will the next step be? –NYPL will host next years meeting –Will work with Cornell and possibly MIT on Metadata Conference

Future of GIS at Columbia  Spatial metadata catalog  GIS project competition  Survey Research Center with GIS capabilities  Dedicated GIS modeling lab for the social Sciences