BTAA-GIN Blog

"There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published." -- Victor Green, in the preface to the 1941 Edition of the Negro Motorist Green Book .   From 1936 to 1966 Victor Green, and later his widow Alma Green, edited the Negro Motorist Green Book which listed businesses that would serve black travelers without harassment or prejudice.  Race or ethnicity of the business owner was not a criteria for inclusion in the listings.  We examined 9 editions of the Green Book, and created an online interactive map of the 86 Detroit businesses.    The businesses were often grouped in African-American neighborhoods. Many of the Detroit locations today are underneath highways, Comerica Park and Ford Field. Other clusters of business can be noted in other parts of the city. This project was undertaken to illustrate the power of combining multiple geospatial datasets to create insight into the past. The addresses in t...

By Jaime Martindale For nearly 15 years, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been collecting and archiving state and local geospatial data.  While students and researchers may be the primary audience, we hope that as these collections grow, broad use by public audiences looking for historical geographic footprints of places in Wisconsin also grows. Wisconsin maintains a series of “Foundational Layers” which are critical to the flow of annual business applications, information sharing, and other use cases in government agencies across the state. For agencies to provide essential public services to constituents, having reliable geospatial data is important to support functions like 911 emergency response, maintenance and construction of roadways, sidewalks or trails, building new facilities, and smart community planning.   As important is it may be to offer users the latest and greatest versions of foundational layers for current issues and applications, having a...

By Meg Mering and Wenjie Wang  What BTAA Library submitted the item?  University of Nebraska-Lincoln  Interesting tidbits  Nebraska National Forests and Grasslands include the Nebraska National Forest, Samuel R. McKelvie National Forest, Buffalo Gap National Grassland, Fort Pierre National Grassland and Oglala National Grassland  Within the United States, North Dakota (1.72%) is the only state that has less forest cover than Nebraska (3.20%).  The Nebraska National Forest (Bessey Ranger District) began in 1902 as an experiment led by Charles Bessey, an UNL botany professor, to produce trees and plant them in what is now the largest human-made forest in the United States.   https://gisgeography.com/nebraska-state-map/   Map of Nebraska. The green highlighted areas indicate the forests in Nebraska.                                 ...

By Shirley Li Featured Item or Collection: Indiana Statewide LiDAR: 2016-2020 What is the item? This index map provides download links to LiDAR data in Indiana. The 3DEP data products consist of lidar point clouds (LAS) and digital elevation model (DEM) data. 3DEP acquisition of QL2 Lidar for the State of Indiana began in spring of 2016 and was completed in the spring of 2020, with the final data delivered in December 2020. The data was made available as a web-based distribution method supported by GDSL@Purdue and Institute for Digital Forestry at Purdue University.    What BTAA Library submitted the item? Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies Interesting tidbits You can not only download the point cloud data, but also the derived DSM, DTM, and NDHM. You can preview DEM and NDHM in the browser The Indiana LiDAR data portal is built using open source technology Caption: LiDAR data download for Marion Count...

By Rob Shepard, GIS Librarian Featured Item or Collection:  University of Chicago's CAMEL Lab Collection What is the item? As part of the University of Chicago's Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures 's efforts to provide public access to information, its Center for Ancient Middle Eastern Landscapes (CAMEL) had published thousands of digitized items from its extensive collection of paper maps and satellite imagery in the institute's integrated database (IDB). However, the inability to spatially search through their collections based on location was limiting any wider public use: As CAMEL Director Mehrnoush Soroush explained "researchers need to see the coverage before selecting an item," and her team began exploring options to better serve the research community. The BTAA Geoportal's map-based interface, which accompanies faceted browsing and text searching tools, was an important factor in their decision to part...

Carmen Benito-Vessels talks about her newest project, a StoryMap Collection entitled "The Missing  Link"   Interviewer: Alice Benjamin, GIS Graduate Assistant,  GIS and Data Service Center , University of Maryland Libraries, College Park   About the Researcher:     Carmen Benito-Vessels is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland.. She is the author of several books, has published numerous articles, and conducts research in the fields of Medieval historiography and poetry, the interaction of medieval literary genres, and Hispanic Philology, among others. Learn more about Carmen Benito-Vessels and her work here:  https://sllc.umd.edu/directory/carmen-benito-vessels .   " The Missing Link " is an interactive guide, presented in a StoryMap format, to accompany Benito-Vessels' research about early modern Spain and the early modern United States. Her work has been recently added in the Big10 geoportal. The p...

By Milan Budhathoki The Morrill Reckoning , one of the latest items added to the BTAA Geoportal, is a project sponsored by University of Maryland Libraries. It was created and fulfilled as part of a certificate practicum requirement by Dr. Lisa Carney in Master in Library Information Science program (2023). This showcase is in line with UMD's commitment to promoting Indigenous knowledge, advancing decolonization efforts, and fostering restorative justice. The initiative is made possible through a 2022-2023 Teaching and Learning Program Grant, " Decolonizing Education to meet the Demands of Climate Change ," led by Patricia Kosco Cossard at UMD Libraries and co-sponsored by the Office of Diversity and Inclusion. Picture 1:  Altered image of the Morrill Act of 1862 highlighting the words " public land ." This web based Morrill Reckoning exhibit documents the process by which land of over 30 Native American nations was forcibly expropriated and sold to fund the en...

By Tara Anthony, Penn State University Libraries   The  BTAA Geoportal  includes historic aerial photography records that span institutions. This post focuses on searching and  locating  aerial photography records in the BTAA Geoportal with a focus on Pennsylvania historical aerial photography collections.    Overview of h istoric aerial photos in the BTAA Geoportal   A  search for aerial photo  yields 1, 701  records  (as of October 2023)  with a h igher  p ortion  of records seen from Pennsylvania, followed by Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Illinois, Nebraska, and New Jersey . The  time  period  of the aerial photo re cords  l o cated  is from  the present back to the 1900 -1949  time  period , with the most records present in the 1950 to 1999 time  per iod .    A highlight of some resources wi ll be  pr ovide...