Learning from the canadian experience of creating a academical Geoportal
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Lustosa Brito, P.; 2Trimble, L.; 3Fortin, M.; 4Caires Tinoco Bisneto Melo, D.H.
1UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA BAHIA Email: britopatricia@hotmail.com
2OCUL SCHOLARS PORTAL Email: leanne.trimble@utoronto.ca
3UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO Email: marcel.fortin@utoronto.ca
4UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DA BAHIA Email: danilo.melo@ufba.br
Abstract
In Brazil a national SDI is being built (INDE), and public universities are defending the importance of participating in this SDI as a node, and not only as a technical consultant. Therefore, we created the research group IDE-UNIVERSIDADE, opened to any professor or researcher interest on this subject, and are developing studies to approach the goal of offering all academic communities, as well as the public, access to geospatial data produced at universities. As a node of a governmental SDI, we also aim to distribute other institutions' geospatial data, though licensed data collection restrictions for educational proposes (if necessary). As part of the research being undertaken by IDE-UNIVERSIDADE, we visited Toronto, Canada in October 2014 to learn about a project of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL). In 2012, OCUL, a consortium of 21 university libraries in the province of Ontario, in Canada, launched Scholars GeoPortal, offering researchers, professors and students of those participating universities online access to geospatial data. The present paper aims to evaluate Ontario's universities experience of implementing Scholars GeoPortal, from the perspective of creating a similar portal for Brazilian universities. The paper was written based on a number of interviews conducted at the University of Toronto. We spoke with Leanne Trimble (co-author of this paper), the Data & Geospatial Librarian who coordinates a team of staff that supports Scholars GeoPortal; with Marcel Fortin (co-author of this paper), Geographic Information Systems (GIS) & Map Librarian who participated as one of the main authors of the original project proposition; and a number of students ranging from undergraduates to PhD candidates, some of whom are also GIS library student assistants who use Scholars GeoPortal in the course of both work and studies. We also examined the Scholars GeoPortal website itself and reviewed its functionality and use. The main results of this study are presented, along with an analysis of main topics that can be learned from this experience towards the creation of a Brazilian academic GeoPortal based on the universities SDI. We found the main difference comparing the Canadian experience and Brazilian initiatives is the projects original motivations and conductions. The Canadian experience was motivated and is been conducted by librarians, while Brazilian experiences are being motivated and conducted by professors, who are aiming to fulfill their educational and research needs. Interviews and report analysis also revealed that GIS functionalities of online map production (for final layout) wasn't as much used as it was expected, indicating that academy users are more interested in finding and downloading geospatial data, to later on manipulate it and generate their own maps at specialized GIS software.
Keywords
SDI; Education; geospatial data