geoLibro.org

At Purdue University, instruction, outreach, and support for GIS will all be increasing coincidental to the arrival of a new GIS Librarian in August 2006. The librarian is me and I just returned from a kind of reconnaissance trip to West Lafayette, the primary purpose of which was to set up the lab that would support this new endeavor by becoming a central point of access for those Purdue students, faculty, and administrators who don’t already have the ability or facility to work with GIS data or software, but whose work might benefit from its  application. Additionally, research and applications conducted or built by Library users of GIS will need to be housed and in some cases published, possibly connected in some way to ongoing repository initiatives. So we’re hoping to buy some pimped-out desktop machines, sure, but also a server to run ArcSDE and ArcIMS installs. I wish I would also have the time to fuss with MapServer or some other open source publisher, but I doubt it very much. Very much. My hands will be full just getting a stable and usable SDE up, then building IMS on top of that will also need some heavy effort. 
 
But this is going to be very interesting, and I hope to document it within this blog for the benefit of others who might have the opportunity to build a GIS Lab (and library-centric program) from scratch.