International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology - June 3, 2016
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The document summarizes the GIS services provided by the libraries at the University of Nevada, Reno, which began in 2014 with technical support and data services for over 21,000 students across various departments, despite limited staff and resources. Key aspects included partnering with student tutoring services on a trial basis, assessing needs, and plans to expand support through additional student hours and potential new staff with assistance from university agencies.
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International Association for Social Science Information Services & Technology - June 3, 2016
- 1. Supporting Campus GIS Needs with Limited Staff and Budgetary Resources Erich Purpur GIS Librarian DeLaMare Science & Engineering Library University of Nevada, Reno Reno, Nevada, USA June 3rd, 2016 IASSIST 2016 Bergen, Norway
- 2. About My Job
- 4. About the School -21,000 students -Geology, Mining, and related departments
- 5. GIS Services in UNR Libraries -since 2014 -Technical support for end users -data gathering, statistical services, data management -users from sciences, social sciences, engineering, business, medical school, humanities -not only ArcGIS
- 6. How did it happen? -partnered with University Tutoring Services -trial period -students + me -No physical space
- 7. The Key - Assessment
- 8. Things We Don’t Do -provide data -Metadata
- 9. Going Forward -Support from agencies -We now have more support -increased student hours -potential new staff
- 10. Thank You. Questions? June 3rd, 2016 IASSIST 2016 Bergen, Norway Erich Purpur GIS Librarian DeLaMare Science & Engineering Library University of Nevada, Reno Reno, Nevada, USA
Editor's Notes
- Hallo alle? Jeg heter Erich og jeg kommer fra USA. I dag, jeg skal snakker på min jobbe på universitetet i Nevada. And that is the extent of my Norwegian, but I thought it would be fun to try. My name is Erich Purpur and I am GIS Librarian from the University of Nevada, Reno. Today the title of my presentation is “Supporting Campus GIS Needs with Limited Staff and Budgetary Resources”. I am going to talk about the GIS services offered in libraries at the University of Nevada, and most importantly how we are trying to do more with less.
- Quickly about me. I am a librarian but my background is in Geographic Information Systems. I have about 9 years experience as a GIS users, mostly with ESRI’s ArcGIS software package, and I’ve been at Nevada for about 2.5 years. In my job I work at the DeLaMare Science & Engineering Library which is a branch library on campus dedicated to serving our science & engineering community. I have 3 main responsibilities. One is to provide GIS support and coordinate GIS services in the library. Another is the care and feeding of our academic library makerspace which features 3D printing and Scanning, Laser Cutters, lendable technology like Oculus Rifts and Google Glasses, etc. The care and feeding of all that equipment and technology takes a lot of time. Lastly, I am a liaison to several departments on campus.
- Quickly, if you are not familiar where Reno is. It is in the western United States, in Nevada. San Francisco is about 3 hours to the west. Reno is located in the desert and is nicknamed the “Biggest Little City in the World”
- Nevada is the state’s land grant institution and serves around 21,000 students. While it offers many degrees it is most well known for the earth sciences but mostly all things related to geology and mining. Mining is a big deal in the state of Nevada.
- We started with very few resources. The library did host a site which mostly contained remote sensing imagery, and provide GIS software on public machines, but no other in house technical support was available. This was mostly because nobody in the library had this skillset. Our GIS services mostly function like traditional reference services. We have times people are available and on duty for walk in consultations. If those times don’t work or they need to follow up, they can schedule an appointment with me. We have seen a lot of use from users around many departments on campus including the sciences, social sciences, engineering, medical school, and humanities. That encompasses most departments. We don’t only offer ArcGIS support. We leverage web based or open source tools when appropriate. Not everyone needs to become a GIS expert, they just want to visually represent their information.
- We started with very few resources. The library did host a site which mostly contained remote sensing imagery, and provide GIS software on public machines, but no other in house technical support was available. This was mostly because nobody in the library had this skillset. -When I first brought this up to the higher ups in the library, they were supportive but did not offer much in the way of funding at that time. -So I came up with this idea. In the building I work in, a branch library for sciences and engineering, the university tutoring center was already offering walk-in tutoring help for students in classes like chemistry, math, physics, biology, etc. Adding GIS help seemed like a logical addition to these services. I initially pitched this idea to the director of the tutoring center, who was receptive. She decided to give me a small number of student hours to begin with on a trial basis for one year to see if there was interest. I was in charge of coordinating the services which included hiring and scheduling tutors. Because I was only granted a few paid student hours, I compensated for that by offering class credit for other students, as an internship. Because I wanted to provide consistent hours every weekday, I filled in the rest of the hours. In the case a student tutor was unable to help a patron, I served as backup. Needless to say, I was heavily invested in this. We had no physical space initially so we carved out a corner of a public computer lab in the building and set up shop there. Despite being a heavily used lab area, we never ran into too many problems having computers available.
- I think the best way to successfully champion your project is to document it thoroughly and use those numbers to your advantage. Assessment is a necessary evil, but I knew that in order to demonstrate the value of GIS services, I needed the numbers behind it. We also documented patron visits in the tutoring center’s system, but there are some issues with that. One is, their system only accommodates students, in classes. Not only students need GIS help and even students use it for other things than just classwork. This information has also proven very beneficial for me in assessing the service. From this I can see who we are helping, what they need help with, where the come from, etc. I have used this for hiring and training new student tutors. Also I have used this for marketing strategies. I started seeing increased users from the business school, public health fields, and biology. This data allowed me to provide increased outreach to those departments.
- -Let’s be honest here. The University of Nevada is not the most prestigious American university and does not have resources comparable to larger public universities like University of Michigan, North Carolina, or well endowed private institutions. The fact is, there are some things we aren’t doing and don’t have the means to do. -I decided that providing the service is the most important service we can provide, as it directly benefits the most people on campus. -for example, we don’t provide services like Harvard’s Geospatial Library or UC Berkeley’s GeoData. We are not a part of Open GeoPortal. We only serve up imagery that is provided elsewhere. Also, for the data we do provide, we don’t curate the metadata and provide only what came with the data. For example, NAIP Imagery is also provided by the USDA (US Department of Agriculture). Providing more data is something we have explored but just don’t have the resources or the people to do it. Because we don’t provide data, we spend more time than usual helping people gather data from different sources. I’ve gotten good at knowing where to go for commonly requested data. I am unsatisfied with what we are providing but that is reality. Also, a lot of our users are from state agencies, or federal agencies working in Nevada. For example, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, or Bureau of Land Management. -this is what our data site looks like. Most of it is Nevada-focused. You can pan around or search on the map and boxes show you what is available for the area you are looking at.
- Now the service is well established and well documented. The tutoring center now provides extra student hours so now I can act more as a coordinator for GIS services and less as a person on the ground. This allows for increased recognition around campus and increased -Because many federal and state agencies are heavy users of our data, we have been having talks with them about committing money to us to host more data for the State. -Because the services have been heavily used