The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

Sometimes the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same as the saying goes. This issue of the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries includes four articles that each highlight the age-old challenges of improving discovery, access, documentation, and use of spatial information, but each does so in contemporary, innovative, and/or important ways. The articles discuss new technologies like spatial data infrastructures, geoportals, accessible coding languages for manipulating spatial data, and documentation techniques—all of which enhance access to and use of spatial information. The articles also discuss the many challenges of organizing cumbersome collections, getting people to share data, learning new professional skills, and combining disparate documentation schemas. Technology is amazing and can help us in our work in many ways, and yet it will never solve all of our problems for us, and so the challenges continue.

In the first article of this issue, authors Atumane and Cabral share the results of a survey of institutions in Mozambique that could contribute to a countrywide spatial data infrastructure (SDI). SDIs in Africa are becoming more common as is documented elsewhere in this journal (see Mwange et al. Volume 50, issue 360; https://doi.org/10.1080/00396265.2016.1259720), but they are nonetheless a major challenge to initiate for both technical as well as social and political reasons. The authors wisely start with a survey of legal frameworks and the willingness and readiness of each potential government agency participant to contribute to an SDI that at its core would contain 15 thematic datasets served openly to Mozambique and the world. The authors conclude that the government agencies surveyed are in a good position to contribute in the near future and that furthermore, there are non-government entities that could also contribute to this important spatial data resource. However, the legal framework and political will to establish an SDI typically comes first from a central governing body. Speaking from personal experience, it can be a major challenge to find reliable and authoritative spatial data for the African continent—let us hope that this article is a first-step towards Mozambique adding themselves to the growing list of SDIs in Africa.

The second article in this issue documents the results of another survey, this one of potential users of historic aerial photography from the state of Idaho, U.S.A. I love historic aerial photographs; they contain tremendous amounts of valuable spatial information while also being incredibly frustrating collections to curate, make available, and to use in application. To help guide the development of an online portal of a historic aerial photography collection, author Godfrey first surveys his potential user base on topics like their desired functionality for an online catalog of photographs. The results of the survey reinforce that there is a great deal of interest in historic aerial photographs and that users find them challenging to access and use. The technology used to build online catalogs of spatial information resources may have finally reached a point where they can elegantly handle challenging collections like historic aerial photographs. European agencies are probably ahead of the rest of the world in this area (see Giordana and Mallet 2019 for an excellent synopsis report from the European Spatial Data Research group), and people like Godfrey and others in the U.S.A. are also pushing us along towards a future of more accessible historic aerial photography collections. How far in the future do we have to look to see high quality and complete digital collections of historic aerial photographs of every state in the U.S.A., posted online for discovery and access? If I squint hard enough, I think I can see this in the not-so-distant future?

In their article about code-literacy for GIS librarians, authors White and Powell provide a compelling argument and share use cases for python and/or R coding languages for performing spatial operations. As an avid user of R and former novice user of python, it was easy for me to agree with this argument that was primarily built on research and instruction challenges that originated outside of their academic libraries. That said, I was struck by their last use case about library collection management and metadata. Those of us who work in libraries or archives tend to manage collections that number in the thousands to millions of items and records that can easily become unruly by their sheer volume. To echo the words of White and Powell, in my experience the ability to script commands to conditionally perform operations on large collections of digital stuff has been invaluable and allowed us to automate tasks that would have otherwise not been possible. Even large-scale tasks that are possible, when done manually with substantial effort contain errors that cannot be reproduced. Everything that I do contains errors and I strive to do my work in a way in which those errors can be reproduced so that I can preserve the ability to correct them someday without doing everything over again (which, let us be honest will probably never happen). R was the first coding language that I learned as a returning student who had received no formal instruction on the topic. Learning R and python is nothing like the courses in C or Fortran that some of us took as undergraduates many years ago. Python and R are user-friendly, accessible languages with well-developed novice and intermediate user communities and online help support. They also operate within a take-your-choice grab-bag of laborsaving development editors that provide easy access to powerful computing techniques like regular expressions, conditional statements, and ‘for’ loops. For me, even more powerful than learning the coding languages and tools themselves has been learning the freedom of “computational thinking.” I no longer feel limited by the number of times a task needs to be carried out on a large collections of items; rather, I look forward to the creative expression of coding workflows that would be arduous to carry out by hand.

Geography is sometimes described as an integrator of disciplinary information and users of spatial data are often seeking to develop the spatial context in which other phenomenon occurs. The authors of the final article in this issue (Jünger, Borschewski and Zenk-Möltgen), struggle with a common problem of spatial contextual research—how to document the inputs and results? In doing so, they present a very thoughtful approach to this problem by adapting an existing data documentation standard (Data Documentation Initiative, or DDI, that is commonly used with social science data), to also hold the information contained in another standard (ISO 19115 that is commonly used to document spatial data). Although this kind of research is routine, few document what they have done and even fewer develop a workflow for others to follow like the authors have done in this article. In a world where funding agencies are increasingly expecting the research data produced by projects that they support to be shared openly; documenting those data for the benefit of future users becomes all the more important and sometimes difficult. In the absence of coherent documentation, research data is of little use to others regardless of whether it is shared openly or not. I suspect that the push for open data will bring with it new and unforeseen data documentation challenges and the authors of the final article in this issue are at the forefront of developing solutions.

This issue also includes a column in our on-going series of professional conference reports. Author Kayko attended the North American Cartographic Information Society annual meetings in Tacoma, WA this year and shared with us her experience. There are a dizzying number and variety of professional conferences to attend and I for one am still trying to find the right communities and/or societies in which to participate. By sharing with each other our experiences at different conferences, it is my hope that we can all make better-informed decisions about how to use our precious professional development time and resources. I also have an ulterior motive, which is that I would like to see more map and geospatial librarians (and related positons), all gathering at the same conference(s) each year. We have so much to learn from each other that every year that passes when we do not all congregate together is another opportunity lost.

Innovative solutions to several ongoing challenges are presented in this issue of the Journal of Map & Geography Libraries in a collection of articles that was a pleasure to co-edit. Sometimes the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

Nathan Piekielek and Marcy Bidney
Coeditors, Journal of Map & Geography Libraries