1. Open source development projects are egalitarian in many interesting and complex ways. Several sessions emerged on the idea of governance within the GeoBlacklight community. How do we reach consensus on design needs and priorities? Which voices tend to influence the direction of software development? How do people who don’t have a deep skill set in developing and coding contribute? Should there be a standard of conduct, at least, to which the community ascribes? These are questions that just about every open source project deals with. At Geo4Lib, we discussed these questions and more in several sessions. Jack Reed shared a few resources, including Jono Bacon’s The Art of Community, and the “Request for Change” process that the ember.js project uses to push ideas and work forward. He also shared some critical philosophical concepts of the Blacklight project that are helpful, such as the idea of semantic versioning and developing without pushing breaking changes. I was on an information panel that also shared some basics of contributing to the community, but I plan on blogging about this in more depth on my personal GitHub pages later. Generally speaking, the GeoBlacklight project has a fairly well-established set of norms for apportioning work and developing, but these can continue to be crystallized moving forward so that even more people contribute work and ideas.
2. The community continues to develop support for index map discovery interfaces that are intuitive and visually compelling. Over the 2018 Winter Community Sprint, Jack Reed, Eric Larson, and others worked to further bolster OpenIndexMaps, a GeoJSON-based specification that allows for fluid integration with IIIF and offers seamless discovery of individual maps within a series. Stanford has already released a prototype, and other institutions plan to follow suit in their own instances of GeoBlacklight. At NYU, we recently added several index maps for large sets (see example) into our discovery interface, and we will make it a project this spring to convert these view to the new specification. It’s on the to-do list.
3. You can use GIS software and tools to generate operable GeoBlacklight metadata. And I’m not talking about ArcCatalog, or other traditional metadata editors. Tom Brittenacher at UC Santa Barbara presented some great strategies for using the fishnet tool in ArcMap to overlay vector gridlines that can be used for metadata creation. Kudos to Tom for modeling this method for making metadata authoring more efficient.
4. San Francisco is a city that has been mapped and contested vis-a-vis the construction of maps for hundreds of years. This was the main idea of David Rumsey’s plenary talk on the second day of the conference. David Rumsey had given an earlier version of this excellent synthesis at the San Francisco Modern Museum of Art’s Public Knowledge series. Rumsey showed numerous examples from his map collection of ways in which ideas about space, access, and communal identity have been drawn onto maps of San Francisco over time.
5. Darren Hardy planned a great conference, and he will be missed by colleagues at Stanford University and beyond. Although we didn’t technically learn this at Geo4Lib Camp, Darren Hardy has recently announced that he is leaving Stanford to take another position in the private sector in Colorado. Darren is one of the original developers on the GeoBlacklight project, and his work in organizing the conference for the past three years and on software development within the community has been significant. We hope that Darren will remain in contact with our project!

Last week, Stephen Balogh and I attended the second annual Geo4LibCamp, hosted by Stanford University. The event marked a great year of progress in the GeoBlacklight community. It was a time to reflect on why our current political situation should influence how libraries collaborate to preserve geospatial data. Here’s five things I learned.

1. Given our exigent situation, we may need to re-think the scale and process of metadata creation. In his excellent plenary talk, Stace Maples modeled ways in which librarians might want to leverage Google’s Cloud Vision API, for instance, to extract workable metadata for scanned maps. The API has the potential to generate searchable terms to help with discovery.
2. Index map layers are an interesting organizing principle to help contextualize the discovery of physical maps. Stanford is already implementing systems for presenting the holdings of Japanese military topographic maps. This includes reference layers in EarthWorks, Stanford’s discovery portal, but also a series of maps hosted on ESRI online. These tools allow users to discover specific maps more quickly and to see where there are gaps in holdings.
3. Jack Reed at Stanford has released a gem called GovScooper that harvests all of the metadata in Data.gov and makes a rudimentary transformation into the GeoBlacklight schema. All of the metadata is now available in OpenGeoMetadata, so anyone can bring records into GeoBlacklight and begin to sort through them. This project, in my opinion, has major potential for rescuing geospatial data and enhancing the discoverability of it.
4. The David Rumsey Map Center, which opened this past year, is amazing! We got to see some incredibly high resolution maps and hear about the process of digitizing and stitching together images.
5. The GeoBlacklight community is very much concerned with user experience. In the un-conference planning session, the intersection of GeoBlacklight an user experience was the most popular proposed session, and when we met, we had some great discussions about the intersection of metadata and application design.

Thanks to Darren Hardy and everyone at Stanford University for hosting such a great and informative conference. I’m already looking forward to next year.