2016 Charleston Library Conference

Ten member institutions of the Big Ten Academic Alliance, formerly the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) worked together to create the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal, a discovery interface to facilitate access, and to connect scholars to geospatial data resources. Ten of the member institutions are participating in the project, including the University of Illinois at Urbana­-Champaign, Indiana University, the University of Iowa, the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin-­Madison. The institutions worked together to identify openly available data sets to make searchable in the interface. The project then organized the collaborative creation and aggregation of discovery-focused metadata describing geospatial data resources and made those resources discoverable via an open source portal built in Geoblacklight. The collectively supported project provides the staffing and technical infrastructure to host and develop the services. The poster will show the organization of this collaborative project and the established processes for collaborative geospatial metadata creation and portal development. It will also outline upcoming work for the project, including interface assessment and plans to include licensed data in the discovery interface.