A U.S. Department of Education, Higher Education Act Title IIA Research and Demonstration Grant (January 1995 - December 1996)
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) consist of a powerful set of automated tools for collecting, retrieving, analyzing and communicating spatial data. Such systems involve not only the automated handling of map data and imagery, but also the automated handling of records and attributes of anything that can be tied to a geographical location on earth. The technology is applicable to remarkably diverse applications ranging from resource management to emergency response and disaster recovery, from political districting to forestry and marine studies, from mass marketing to urban infrastructure management, and from local studies through regional analysis to global change research.
Improved geographic information handling capabilities continue to find expanding applications throughout society at an accelerating rate. Future public and private investment in GIS and spatial databases is estimated in many billions of dollars. Creation of an infrastructure for the exchange of spatial data among private citizens, commercial businesses, federal agencies, libraries and local governments is a national priority initiative within the National Information Infrastructure (NII). The National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), recommended by the Clinton administration, supports integration of multiple data sources into a single digital resource accessible to anyone with a personal computer.
The rapid success of the geographic information academic field is currently causing problems in the effective dissemination of research results and consequently in the advancement of the field. Even though the number of academic journals in the field has increased greatly over the past several years, the time lag between manuscript submission and publication is typically 12-18 months. In contrast, conference proceedings, which are not necessarily the most polished or ultimately the most lasting literature resource of the GIS academic research community, are extraordinarily fertile sources of information. In rapidly moving field of GIS, conference proceedings form an important literature base that is vital to reseachers working with spatial data systems.
Conference proceeding articles are the "gray literature" of most academic disciplines and professions. Unlike formal academic journals, conference proceedings are difficult to access: they are not indexed consistently and the text typically is not available online. Although the quality of proceedings articles is seldom controlled through a formal referring process, rapid technological advancements and extensive social experimentation with GIS in recent years has made this literature base of significant value to the GIS research and applications communities. GIS conference proceedings provide a valuable forum for investigators to explore new ideas and present summaries of preliminary research results. They also allow researchers to report on progress and preliminary findings in order to receive feedback from peers as their work progresses. In contrast, one to two years lead time for acceptance of articles in the more respected peer-reviewed journals in the discipline is not uncommon. In this way, alternative technical and policy paths are exposed in a more timely fashion and less waste occurs in following inappropriate system development paths.
The GIS Literature Database Project is a collaborative endeavor to provide distributed network access to bibliographic information for GIS "gray literature." Five leading professional organizations involved in publishing GIS conference proceedings in the U.S. agreed to participate in this project. Project funding (U.S. Department of Education, Higher Education Act Title IIA Research and Demonstration Grant ( January 1995 - December 1996)) covered the retrospective conversion of articles in proceedings for 1994, and electronic files of articles for 1995 submitted by authors.
As of March, 2000, the Spatial Odyssey database contains citations from the tables of contents for conference proceedings and spatial information-related compendia for the years 1991-1998. The tables of contents, available online as the NCGIA Annual GIS Bibliographies Series, can be browsed or searched using the Alta Vista search engine. Hypertext links from the bibliographic citations to the full text of articles are in place for the 1994 proceedings only.
Current project staff include Dr. Harlan Onsrud, Nancy Adams, Marilyn Lutz and the contributions of graduate students in the Spatial Information Science and Engineering program at the University of Maine.
Spatial Odyssey is a free World Wide Web service accessible using any current version of WWW client software. The Spatial Odyssey homepage is http://libraries.maine.edu/spatial/gisweb/.
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