BTAA-GIN Blog

By Danny Dotson Source:   EPA One of the features the Interface Committee has heard that would be useful for the Geoportal to have is the ability to either search for or filter by language.  So fine, let's make that happen. But, this is going to cause work in other areas to make language searching/filtering actually work well. Why is this the case?   Metadata: Does Each Item Have a Language listed? Short answer: no. So this means for language to be a valuable search/filter option, items need to have a language included in their metadata. Many currently don't.  Most of these are very likely in English as they are geospatial data sources from various government entities in the US.  But until we make sure and the change is made, the language for these items is essentially non-existent.  So the people working with metadata would need to examine the language-less items to add the appropriate language to the item's metadata. This can be time consuming just b

By BTAA GIN Project Team Members Feature: Ukraine Maps and Data This post lists geospatial resources related to Ukraine from many sources around the world. While the Geoportal does contain some maps of Ukraine , they are from non-Ukrainian agencies and primarily date back to WWII (or older); these maps may not provide the information our users are currently seeking. Librarians from the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Information Network (BTAA GIN) Project Team have compiled some additional, more current resources for Geoportal visitors. Caption: Map view of the Geoportal's resources on Ukraine. Click here or on the map to view search results in the Geoportal. Maps and Data from News Agencies These sources are provided by national-level news agencies. We believe that most of the content is freely available, though some portions may require a subscription. Al Jazeera Infographic News: Russia-Ukraine war by the numbers: Live Tracker BBC: Ukraine maps: At-a-glance guide to the R

By Milan Budhathoki The World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in early 2020 citing that the disease had high human-to-human transmission and it's severity to public health. As the COVID-19 outbreak began, many researchers and bio-pharma around the world were working diligently to find a vaccine that potentially cures SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the COVID-19 global pandemic. Development of a successful vaccine would take several years and it is a tedious process that involves complex science, and thorough scrutiny by the government (i.e, authorizing body) before administering it to humans to prevent/cure disease. In-contrast to the traditional pipeline in vaccine development, COVID-19 pandemic had led to an urgency in developing vaccines at record speed. In the past, not many people were interested in the vaccine development model/science and business until COVID-19 pandemic hit hard on humanitarian and economic development. Figure 1: Vaccine Development Pipeli

By Laura Kane McElfresh Featured Item or Collection: Fire insurance maps of Minneapolis ("Sanborn atlases"), 1912 and 1923-1930 (hard copies) What is the item? Two sets of Minneapolis "Sanborn atlases" ( Fire insurance maps of Minneapolis ), published in 1912. These large maps (the books are 70 cm high, or 27 1/2 inches) are drawn on a 1:600 scale (50 feet = 1 inch) and show a building-level, block-by-block depiction of the city. Caption: Sanborn maps "show the size, shape, and construction of dwellings, commercial buildings, and factories as well as fire walls, locations of windows and doors, sprinkler systems, and types of roofs. The maps also indicate widths and names of streets, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers". -- Introduction to the Sanborn Map Collection , Library of Congress Previously owned by the City of Minneapolis, these Sanborn Atlases were among a collection of Twin Cities-area maps and atlases stored in the