Présentations
Lundi, 13 juin
An Overview of Current Online Mapping ToolsJoel Rivard, Rebecca Bartlett, Sherri Sunstrum, Meaghan Kenney, Monica Ferguson, Carleton University
The map and GIS experts at Carleton University Library field many questions from students and researchers who want to create an online map as part of their studies, but who have little to no mapping experience. To familiarize ourselves with and evaluate various online mapping tools, we tested them based on specific scenarios we'd encountered. In this session we will outline how we chose the online mapping tools, how we established our scenarios and related tasks, and how we went about evaluating each online mapping tool. We will also discuss the varying levels of experience of team members, which ensured we evaluated the tools from a variety of perspectives.
A First Peoples territories acknowledgment map for the Victoria BC area: Struggling with simplicity and complexity
daniel Brendle-Moczuk, University of Victoria
The University of Victoria territory acknowledgment states that "we acknowledge and respect the lək̓ʷəŋən peoples on whose traditional territory the university stands and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day." Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of faculty, public and students have asked over the years for a 'map' of indigenous territories and place names specifically of what is now the Victoria BC area and Vancouver Island. Of course, a single map does not exist. This presentation will describe several maps of the Victoria area, as well as BC and Canada, featuring First Peoples and Nations, from Alexander Mackenzie to Franz Boas, the charts of the Admiralty Hydrographic Office, the maps of the National Atlas of Canada, maps from BC Land Titles Survey Authority through to some contemporary cartography. In addition, this presentation will detail the current attempt, in conjunction with local First Peoples, to create a territorial acknowledgment map for the entrance of UVic Libraries. .
GIS Data in Ontario Universities: Assessing Current and Future Needs Through the GeoPortal Redevelopment Survey
Rene Duplain, University of Ottawa & Kara Handren, University of Toronto
Since 2019, the OCUL Geo Community has been working towards a redevelopment of the Scholars GeoPortal. This information gathering process, which was informed by surveys of the libraries and their researchers, as well as conversations with vendors and technical staff, is now complete, and a formal business case has been submitted to OCUL. In this presentation we will describe our information gathering process in detail, why we decided to use surveys, how we analysed them, and what they tell us regarding the changing GIS needs in Ontario university libraries.
Wikidata
Kyla Jemison, & Julia Gilmore, University of Toronto
Libraries are increasingly interested in Wikidata, a knowledgebase for linked open data, as a means to practice linked data and provide structured data for reuse across the internet. Wikidata connects with many other internet-based tools, including Google searches and other projects in the Wikimedia family. It can also be queried directly, generating tables, graphs, maps, and other visualizations. When the University of Toronto Libraries participated in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging's Wikidata Pilot project in 2021, we identified a number of projects that we wanted to contribute to Wikidata. We were unable to finish the project centered around campus buildings during the pilot, so in 2022 we hired a student to complete this project. Through consultation with archives, local and international colleagues, and other resources, including campus maps, Julia Gilmore developed a framework and gathered data about these structures and locations to transform them into Wikidata. This process raised many interesting questions about how a university campus is organized and mapped. We explored issues around relationships between parts of the university; roles and ownership of buildings (which can and often do change over time); data provenance; selection and population of properties; and querability of data. Pursuing the answers to these complicated questions provided us with a deeper understanding of the structure and function of Wikidata, and provided a more thorough picture of the University of Toronto campus in Wikidata. We hope to share our findings and experience to demonstrate the use of cartographic, historical, and architectural information in Wikidata.
Mardi, 14 juin
Historical Transit Vector DataJoel Rivard, Meaghan Kenny, Carleton University
We invite you on an Esri StoryMap Tour highlighting the creation of individual vector transit routes for OC Transpo, the City of Ottawa's public transit agency between 1929 and 2021. The StoryMap illustrates the two processes used to compile these route datasets and touches on the various resources used in the past and the ones that we currently use. Lastly, we'll provide information on the final products, such as attribute information, file format as well as information on how to access them.
Geographies of Virtual Reference
Lisl Schoner-Saunders & Guinsly Mondésir, OCUL
With the onslaught of the global COVID19 pandemic, universities were forced to quickly pivot to exclusively remote and virtual service options. To further complicate the situation, a large number of the international student populations at these institutions were forced to study remotely in their home countries due to the pandemic and visa restrictions. In Canada and Ontario, International students make up a major revenue source for post-secondary institutions, making the need to find viable solutions to continue to serve these populations essential to their financial stability. The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) runs a shared virtual reference service, called Ask a Librarian (Ask). This poster session will assess the impact of the global pandemic through a comparative study of the service previous to and during the pandemic. Using IP addresses, this study will evaluate the impact of geographical location on the user's experience of and access to virtual library resources, as well as identify any barriers, shifts, or trends in the service. The COVID19 pandemic has changed the face of education and remote learning indefinitely. The hope of this study is to assess the overall success and pitfalls of our current virtual reference services and suggest areas of improvement for the future.
The NTS 1:50,000 Maps Project: Leveraging library partnerships to build national geospatial data research infrastructure
Kara Handren & Amber Leahey, University of Toronto
Consisting of over 28,000 maps of Canada, the National Topographic System (NTS) 1:50,000 map series represents over 60 years of data from 1948 to the present, with maps produced for each area of the country every 5 to 10 years. As this series stretches across geography and time, it represents an invaluable record of changes in the natural and human geography of the country. However despite its value, collaborative management of this collection has been difficult given its extent, and has largely been constrained to shared inventories of print maps. This has limited discovery, access and reuse of the maps and data. Beginning in 2019, a partnership between the University of Toronto Libraries (UTL), Scholars Portal (SP), McGill University Library, Canadiana, and other collaborating partners, sought to digitize, georeference and describe this collection in order to bring this map series into both the Scholars GeoPortal and Dataverse. Our presentation will highlight the results of this work, which to date has made thousands of maps openly discoverable online and which, as it expands to additional areas of the country, continues to draw upon new expertise and partners. We will outline how this project can contribute to developing Canada's national research data infrastructure, while also providing a roadmap for future projects. Our hope is that the workflows established for publishing digitized and georeferenced geospatial map data can be built upon for years to come.
Rural Drone Data Collection
Zach MacDonald, Western University
Aerial LiDAR Data Collection: Lessons Learned
Dan Jakubek & Jimmy Tran, Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU)
This presentation will introduce a Drone Learning Program that was created through a collaboration in the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) Library. The focus of our presentation will be lessons learned in data creation using LiDAR technology, Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) (drones) and related software applications.