You’re a graduate student in a geography education program learning about the concepts underlying a geographic information system, including creating, analyzing and editing geospatial data sets. Part of your coursework also includes learning about the preservation of GIS data.
As an academic librarian, your position oversees the gathering and management of geospatial data as well as the content produced as a result student coursework. You want to discover what the best practices and standards are in creating and promoting metadata used to describe geospatial data.
You’re an electronic records archivist responsible for the management, acquisition, appraisal, description and preservation of state agency and local geospatial data and records. You need to justify to your agency the additional resources required to steward geodata.
In the above user scenarios, the grad student, the archivist and the librarian are interested in various aspects of the preservation of digital map information. Where can they find information to help them in their search? To start, they can visit geopreservation.org.
Over the past couple of years, NDIIPP has helped develop the Geospatial Data Preservation Resource Center with the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at Columbia University to serve as a central information resource and clearinghouse for communities interested in the preservation of geospatial data.
Geospatial data may be generated and managed in a wide-range of academic institutions, research centers, federal and state government agencies and digital archives. Users in these communities may be familiar stewarding this unique digital data. But others in their organizations with whom they work collaboratively may not have experience working with geospatial information. This is where geopreservation.org can serve as a valuable resource.
For example, the site points to a number of education and training resources about geospatial data preservation, such as reports highlighting preservation issues, introductory information about specific geospatial topics and examples of what other institutions are doing. Information sources like these offer a starting point to discover relevant standards, tools, policies and best practices that can help individuals and their organizations understand the challenges of managing and preserving geospatial data.
Geopreservation.org continues to add new resources about preserving digital map information . If you have suggestions, you can contribute them here.