geoLibro.org

Today was my first day as the GIS Librarian at Purdue University and I’m thrilled to have finally begun. The lab machines aren’t here yet (one is, but there are still some map cabinets in the way of where we’ll place it: a debatably apt allegory, I suppose), but I’ve got plenty to do even in advance of setting up the lab machines.Those of you who said you were interested in the mechanics of a library-based lab may find this interesting: Purdue makes ArcGIS available via a Citrix server, so the software runs on a server and gets "piped" (via tubes, like Senator Stevens said) to your machine via the use of client software. It works…alright. On my pimped-out XP box, on campus, it worked very well, but with noticeable lag. On my PowerBook G4 it worked almost as well via campus wireless but to be honest it would drive me crazy over time. I’m guessing Parallels is better, and BootCamp almost certainly is. (There was no noticeable difference over VPN from home, and that was on the PowerBook connected wirelessly to home network on a cable line).

At Purdue University, instruction, outreach, and support for GIS will all be increasing coincidental to the arrival of a new GIS Librarian in August 2006. The librarian is me and I just returned from a kind of reconnaissance trip to West Lafayette, the primary purpose of which was to set up the lab that would support this new endeavor by becoming a central point of access for those Purdue students, faculty, and administrators who don’t already have the ability or facility to work with GIS data or software, but whose work might benefit from its  application. Additionally, research and applications conducted or built by Library users of GIS will need to be housed and in some cases published, possibly connected in some way to ongoing repository initiatives. So we’re hoping to buy some pimped-out desktop machines, sure, but also a server to run ArcSDE and ArcIMS installs. I wish I would also have the time to fuss with MapServer or some other open source publisher, but I doubt it very much. Very much. My hands will be full just getting a stable and usable SDE up, then building IMS on top of that will also need some heavy effort. 
 
But this is going to be very interesting, and I hope to document it within this blog for the benefit of others who might have the opportunity to build a GIS Lab (and library-centric program) from scratch.