NYU’s Spatial Data Repository (SDR) makes geospatial data searchable, viewable in browser, and usable for research. The SDR includes over 97,000 items ranging from a georeferenced 1797 map of Dublin to the Ecoregions of the United States and much more.
On top of connecting to other NYU services (including the Faculty Digital Archive), the SDR also shares geospatial data from 20 collaborating institutions like the Big Ten Data Alliance, Princeton University, and Scholars Portal Dataverse.
The Spatial Data Repository is supported by a collaborative service team of developers, managers, DevOps engineers, and librarians across NYU Libraries and IT. This year, the team took on the major task of upgrading the repository—a coordinated effort that involved updating the GeoBlacklight discovery application stack, migrating the metadata schema and processing workflows, swapping authentication endpoints, and managing infrastructure changes (See: CHANGELOG).
The project began by contracting Ruby on Rails developer Michael Cain in late June. Since then, the team has met weekly to power through complex tasks and make use of Michael’s invaluable time and expertise. We were also lucky to welcome NYU’s new Metadata Librarian for Science & Geospatial Data Zehong Liu to the team in the fall.
While there are still minor patches and features to be added, the team celebrated a milestone version 2 deployment of the SDR with GeoBlacklight v4 on November 29th. 🎉
Thank you to:
- Michael Cain and Marii Nyrop for development
- Zehong Liu, Nicholas Wolf, and Alex Whelan for metadata curation
- Derrick Xu and Kate Pechekhonova for DevOps engineering
- Michelle Thompson Gumbs and Carol Choi for QA testing
- Him Mistry, Deb Verhoff, and Carol Kassel for project leadership and coordination