BTAA-GIN Blog

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 primary goal of