Welcome to NACIS 2015 in Minneapolis! This is the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). The theme for this year’s meeting is Mapping Interactions. See the schedule below and go to the NACIS website for more details.
The North American Cartographic Information Society, founded in 1980, is an organization comprised of specialists from private, academic, and government organizations whose common interest lies in facilitating communication in the map information community.
For those of you who were unable to attend the conference, or who couldn’t clone themselves to be at multiple talks at once, many slides are linked in the session descriptions below. Twin Cities local Kitty Hurley also put together this fantastic document summarizing much of what she saw at the meeting, so if slide decks aren’t linked, check out her notes.
The maps in unexploited library map drawers, inaccessible stocks of map publishers, under-utilized archives in museums, and even unexplored private collections could prove invaluable in providing views into the past if shared with wider audiences online. A good example is the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Historical Topographic Map Explorer which provides access to almost 180,000 scanned maps through an interface that offers easy exploration, visual comparison, and speedy download of maps in the collection. Using this web app as an example, our workshop takes you step-by-step through a solution for converting map collections to a format that can be shared online. You’ll learn how to scan, georeference, and build metadata for the maps; how to convert the scanned map images to image services; and how to create and use web maps in a web app that provides the user interface and functionality for useful and engaging online map exploration.
