UCS MLG Minutes 6-6-05

Catalog each flight (12,000 – 24,000?) at flight level (about 200 frames per flight on average) They have coverage of entire state. Additional coverage of southern CA south of Santa Barbara.
Scanning indexes (8000 indexes).
Scanning aerial photos (about 3 million air photos, 1 ½ million are unique items) 130,000 frames scanned now. Starting with high use.

What map libraries want to do matches with commercial firms. Libraries differ from commercial firms because they have no time constraints. MIL has about 90 searches a day.

MIL policies:

They don’t scan anything that’s copyrighted by anyone other than the regents. The scans are copyrighted by the regents. Some companies have allowed a scan of the index.

UCB (William)

His company is working on indexing at UCB.
Track Info Services – working with libraries. (William)

The company helps people trace land use history of property. It’s mostly commercial or industrial property, but some residential. They do this for the whole US. Most of the demand is from engineering firms. They have a database of government records but these only go back to 70’s or 80’s. Looking for other sources (aerial photos, old city directories, etc). They are now working with libraries and historical societies. They would like to work with these organizations to provide the scanning or cataloging in order to get access to the material. They have made many different arrangements (e.g. student internships) to get this done.

They are looking for scale, elevation, etc. of flights for each county. Trying to make statewide grid of what libraries have what coverage, including who has the best coverage of each county. Then they get that material scanned. They are also doing bulk scanning of most commonly used things and donating the scans back to the library.

Sanborn map scanning project (Julie)

Julie talked to John Hebert and Colleen Cahill about scanning the pre-1923 Sanborn atlases for California and then putting them into the American Memory. LC needs staff more than money. They would hire and train the person and we would pay for it (or we could send someone). We could have copies of the scans.

Colleen sent list of all the maps in CA. There are 18,532 sheets that could be scanned from 1884-1923. Colleen will come up with cost estimates. Julie’s rough calculations indicate that it would take a full time person 6 ½ years, so not feasible at that level.

The group discussed options, including cherry picking atlases, finding a partner, and/or grant funding. The group expressed interest in pursuing this.

ACTION: Julie will talk to Colleen more about cost estimates, how much scanning we could get (capacities) and do we need to bring in our own equipment. What other projects does LC have in the queue? Where does this fit in with what they are doing? Do they have storage?

ACTION: Mary will look into grant deadlines and meet with Lucia Snowhill. Then report back to the group and we can decide how to proceed.

Digital Sanborn tier 2 purchase (Cynthia)

Proquest is interested in negotiating. The group decided to request that it be added to the list of tier 1 requests. Make it clear that the reason we need it is post-1923 content.

ACTION: Cynthia will draft letter and send it to us before sending on to Lucia.

Japanese historic maps in Luna (Julie)

Phil Hoehn has been interested in creating MARC records for these maps. Phil requests that a letter come from this group asking that Phil create MARC records. The group agreed.

ACTION: Kathy will write the letter.

Shared cataloging proposal (Cynthia )

To catalog and capture online maps, web content. Copy and original cataloging. Records will come through SCP with same loaders as other records.

Proposing to add the 255 field (scale) to short display in Melvyl. Group agreed that this sounds like a good idea.

ACTION: Cynthia will find out the procedures for these requests.

LC Map Conference follow-up

Attendees agreed that it was a very good conference. CUAC is planning to transcribe the talks.

Discussed map organizations and future meetings like this.

California topo map scanning project (Julie)

Steering committee – Doug Shenk (USGS), Mary Larsgaard (chair, beginning July 1, 2006), Kathy Stroud, and David Deckelbaum volunteered. John Novak and William Terrazzas may serve as consultants to advise the group.

Other projects/participants?

USGS interested. Reston collection should be most complete collection of CA.

John Hebert from LC said they are not interested in scanning the topos.

Jamie Martindale at UW Madison in map library. They are looking at map scanning.

Western Michigan U. is planning to scan all topos for the US at 700-800 dpi. They will be georeferenced. They want to be able to pull out layers (vectorize).

Next steps – Kathy set up the list and she and Greg Hajic set up web site. A survey was created and sent out for comment to the topo scanning email list. The survey needs to go to the steering committee for approval. Steering committee will look at the list of possible recipients of the survey and expand it. Then will need to talk about what happens next – funding, etc.

Need updates to the web site (http://www.sdc.ucsb.edu/holdings/caltopo.html) including responsibility, scale, and time range.

ACTION: Mary will ask the Caltopo list if someone can organize these changes.

One thing that came out of the CUAC conference is the need for a national list of topo scanning projects. Liz Paulus agreed to create the site but would like help with the content. For California, could link to MIL.

ACTION: Cynthia and Julie will bring this issue to WAML web committee this summer.

Update on NDIIPP/NGDA grant (Julie/Mary)

7 months into the 1st year. Both UCSB and Stanford are starting to build repositories. Format registries (what is a shape file, what is a geo tiff) are very important. These registries exist for non-geospatial formats but hadn’t been built for geospatial. Mary, Tracy Erwin, and Julie are working on collection development policies for geospatial collections (how they differ for digital vs paper) and how to deal with versions, life cycle issues, etc.

CASIL letter of support for AmericaView (Kathy)

Last year sent out letter of support for CASIL effort to become associate member of America View. Now applying for full membership and asked for a letter of support. They would also like UC/S map libraries to be on the executive board. This would include money to pay for travel to board meetings. The convener of this group would go to board meeting. The group agreed.

Round robin

UCSB (Mary) – MIL projects already discussed earlier. Recently hired Rachel Winkel to fill a vacant LAII position.

UCD (Kathy) - GIS workstation avail by appointment. She has held a couple of introductory workshops. Attendance was 20+ and 8. A lot of grad students attended.

Note: Kathy heard from California Natural Resources Agency. There will be a 1m resolution CA flight this summer. The images will georeferenced. They will be available spring 2006 and up on CASIL.

UCI (Yvonne and Julia) – They consult with people about GIS data but don’t really provide software assistance. At Irvine, there are many pockets of non-ESRI software being used for making maps (e.g. MapPoint). They have found that the patrons aren’t doing as much analysis as they had predicted. Some of the patrons are really just making simple maps and so don’t need ESRI’s GIS software.

Julie mentioned that when this happens at Stanford they are directing people to Mountain High Maps. This CD includes copyright-free maps that can be annotated, edited, etc using FreeHand, Illustrator and Corel Draw. Stanford has the CDs on permanent reserve and loans them for two days.

UCSD (Megan and Dawn) – Larry Cruse is retiring at the end of June. He’ll be back part time starting in August. UCSD has added a map & atlas scope to the online catalog. Dawn is an ESRI-certified instructor and is scheduled to teach a two day Arc-GIS I course at the library to see how that works. Instead of the common $850 fee, the course is being offered to UCSD affiliates for the cost of the books (about $100). 14 people have registered. Also working on a project to create metadata for vector data.

UCSC (Cynthia) – An LAIV resigned so they will be recruiting for that position. The map room will be closed next week while they swap out map cases. Santa Cruz is also interviewing UL candidates right now.

UCB (Cynthia for Fatemah) – They will be posting an LA position for maps. Fatemah doesn’t expect any interruption in the ILL process.

UCLA (David) – Planning for a map reading room (in current space). If/when it happens they may need to send more maps to storage and they may have open stacks again.

Stanford (Julie) – They are starting to move some low-use maps off campus to a facility in Livermore due to excess weight load in the library. They will start moving maps in July and the project will take about a year and a half. They have finished the Moran map collection project, which will go to special collections. They are separating the duplicate historic geologic maps and reports, which they will send to the library in the area covered. Stanford has hired two new people: Sam Teplitzky (Earth Sciences Librarian) and Tracy Erwin (Geospatial Librarian for grant). The Stanford Geological survey project – there are still 6000 images to put on the web. They will try to get as much done as possible this summer.

UCR (Wendie) – Staffing will be down this winter. A GIS student finished the index of aerial photos. She has entomologists coming in for GIS data.

Administrative

There is confusion between the chair of this group and the chair of the UC Maps & Geography bibliographers group. It was proposed that we change the name from chair to convener for our group. The group agreed.

Cynthia is currently chair of the UC Maps & Geography bibliographers group. There is no set schedule for rotating and Cynthia willing to turn it over.

Kathy Stroud is now officially our new convener.

Next meeting: UCLA - Tentatively Friday, December 9.

Agenda items next meeting:

Follow up on CASIL
Sanborn update
Topo scanning project update
Proquest sanborn update
NDIIPP update

Meeting adjourned at 3:45