About

The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded the University of Chicago Library a National Leadership Grant to support the hosting of national forums on GIS librarianship. Organized in collaboration with the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS), the project - GIS Librarians for Open Workflows (GLOW), will focus on the workflows of librarians and library staff charged with supporting geographic information systems (GIS) and its use across diverse academic disciplines. The $133K grant will support multiple in-person forums, workshops, and coordination of existing and new open educational resources (OERs).

Leading the project is Cecilia Smith, Director of Digital Scholarship at the UChicago Library and former GIS and Maps Librarian, in collaboration with Diana Sinton, Senior Research Fellow at the UCGIS. The Library will host exchanges with librarians around their existing consulting and instructional workflows and practices, and their development and use of open educational resources (OERs). To provide meaningful relevance for the GIS librarian community as a whole, the forums will ground these exchanges in concrete examples from social justice, health, and infrastructure application areas. The two forums being planned will inform the production and deployment of the commonly duplicated workflows and activities undertaken within university library contexts, building on shared vocabularies and practices. A second focal area includes review of current and future digital platforms regularly used as portals for data search and dissemination.

The Institute of Museum and Library Services is the primary source of federal support for the nation's libraries and museums. The IMLS National Leadership Grant for Libraries “support projects of national impact that address significant challenges and opportunities facing the library and archives fields and have the potential to advance theory and practice.” Of the 139 proposals submitted, 39 projects were selected during this round of funding.

The GLOW organizers are grateful for the contributions of the Steering Committee:

• Wade Bishop, University Tennessee, Knoxville
• Jen Green, University of Chicago
• Angela Lee, Esri
• Ariana Santiago, University of Houston