Changes

The transition from paper maps to digital ones changed much more than the maps themselves; it changed the very foundation of how we work and how we find each other. Now maps are transforming again. The Geospatial World is moving from GIS systems that are institutionally-focused, expensive, feature-burdened, and binds data into a complicated and demanding user-hostile interface. From this transition from digital to web-based digital geospatial tools has come growth and development in new forms of map-based investigative journalism, activism, scholarship, and business ventures. This talk will highlight the conditions and strategies that made these changes possible as a means to draw a path by which librarians through our own work may follow, dragons notwithstanding.

* Rich Trott, rtrott@gmail.com, UC San Francisco