Imagine the year is 2075. A researcher contacts a library seeking historical maps and data to document a city’s geographic transformation from 1980 to 2020. But can the library provide them?
If current practices continue, the answer may be disappointing: a librarian would be able to share scans of print maps from the 20th century, but would have little to offer for the 21st. Few organizations are systematically archiving public geospatial data, especially at the local level. As a result, future historians may face a “digital dark age,” not because the data was never created, but because it was never preserved.
This talk provides evidence of the growing temporal gap in geospatial collections and explores the consequences of inaction. It also discusses how government spatial data infrastructures fail to address preservation and offers guidelines for libraries looking to build a geospatial data archive.
Karen Majewicz is the Associate Director of the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Information Network at the University of Minnesota, where she leads technology and data curation activities for the BTAA Geoportal. Her research interests include metadata standards, open data, digital archives, and the history of national spatial data infrastructures. She holds a Master of Geographic Information Science from the University of Minnesota.
