6th annual Geo4LibCamp moves online with record attendence

On February 8, 9, and 10th 2021, 175 people from across the globe met for the 6th annual Geo4LibCamp. This time the conference was hosted online using the Zoom platform. Previous Geo4LibCamps have been hosted on Stanford University’s campus at the Hartley Conference Center and in the David Rumsey Map Center. This year’s online event broke prevoius attendence records of the event that brings together those building repository and associated services for geospatial data to share best practices, solve common problems, and address technical issues.

The conference represented a set of people from many different organizations and countries. We had attendees from Australia, Spain, United Kingdom, Canada, Singapore, and the United States. Attendees represented universities and colleges, consulting agencies, large geospatial companies, map centers, public libraries, and non-governmental organizations.

On Monday February 8th, we kicked off Geo4LibCamp with two mini-workshops. One workshop was a deep-dive into the GeoBlacklight software, while the other focused on creating ArcGIS Storymaps. We finished up the day by planning the unconference and then moved into an online social event.

Tuesday started with two incredible keynote talks. “The library’s role during the pandemic: public research and the JHU global COVID-19 dashboard” given by Mara Blake and Reina Murray from Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries and “Catching Existential Malaise: Contagion Studies and the Dialectic of Routine in Groundhog Day”  given by Andrew Battista of New York University. The keynotes led into our unconference sessions that afternoon.

Wednesday, the final day of the event, included lighting talks and more unconference sessions. While the in-person event was missed by many, we were still able to hold eight unconference sessions on a wide-ranging set of topics including:

• Extracting vector data from raster images of historical maps; Gazetteers
• Collaborations: Large-scale geoportals and OpenGeoMetadata
• OpenIndexMaps
• IIIF and Maps
• Curating and managing data services, APIs, and other collections you don’t “own.”
• Geoportal support of large data sets (e.g LIDAR)
• Geospatial Metadata
• Technology Stacks: GeoBlacklight, GeoServer, and a survey of alternative options

The open shared notes document for the meeting is provided as an artifact of the events that took place.

We look forward to seeing you at next year’s event!