28. The Evolution of Geospatial Data Discovery at MIT

The poster will outline the changes in the technology used to house the MIT Libraries geospatial data collection over time and outline the specific criteria we evaluated as we made changes through the 21 years that we have been offering geospatial data discovery systems. We will describe our best practices for collaboration and communication between GIS and IT staff and how that helped to create the best system for our users.

The MIT Libraries first created access for users to our geospatial data collection in 2002, with an ESRI geodatabase and a desktop search interface written in Visual Basic. Subsequent generations of the collection and search tool evolved from locally coded search interfaces using open source tools to OpenGeoPortal and eventually to GeoBlacklight, with MIT Libraries engineers contributing to GeoBlacklight development. Throughout all of this, our geospatial collection remained separate from the rest of the MIT Libraries collections.

Because of staffing and skill changes, technical limitations, and a desire to integrate all of our collections, MIT Libraries is currently moving from GeoBlacklight to a system directly integrated with other library systems and collections. The initial change will lose spatial search capabilities but will integrate our geospatial collection with other collections and will be powered by MIT Libraries’ TIMDEX search API. We are currently planning the next steps beyond the TIMDEX text search, which will include both spatial search capabilities and the ability to examine geospatial data before downloading it.