Contributor Spotlight: University of Iowa
This post is part of a monthly series to highlight each Big Ten Academic Alliance university that contributes to the geoportal.
Project Task Force Members
Catherine Hodge, Monographs and Cartographic Resources Cataloger, and Rob Shepard, Geospatial Information Systems Specialist
Overview of Collections
Our largest contribution by volume comes from two of our digital collections: the Hixson Plat Map Atlases of Iowa and the Iowa Counties Historic Atlases. By adding these collections to the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal in 2016, University of Iowa was the first institution to contribute a series of scanned historic maps. Both collections predate the BTAA Geospatial Task Force, however we felt that the project would aid in discovery and access of these items. Additionally, many of the township atlases have been georeferenced, providing a service to GIS users that had no platform within our digital library collection. The BTAA Geoportal allowed us to link our original records for the scanned maps with these georeferenced, tiled map services of these county atlases, giving visitors the additional option to download or use these web map services in their research or web development.
