Executive Director's Report

National GIS Day is upon us. I hope that all of you in the UC Berkeley community will find some time to explore the various activities your colleagues are hosting on November 19 to show you something about what's happening with GIS on campus. Thanks to Lori Tsung for bringing it all together.

Apart from all the activity you'll see on campus on GIS Day, it may seem that things are pretty quiet in the GISC right now. However, underneath that calm are many busy people working very hard to make GIS something everyone at Cal can participate in. Here's some of the things we've been working on:

  • a functional HelpDesk. Our HelpDesk is currently staffed by Josh Metz and Wei Luo for six hours per week in 124 Mulford. Drop in with questions about how to get started using GIS, how to get your dataset working in GIS or how to find the data you need. Or send mail to the HelpDesk and your enquiry will be addressed during the next HelpDesk session.
     
  • a regularly repeating cycle of three introductory GIS classes. These courses are targeted to those who want to get started with GIS. We have concentrated on our introductory classes this fall and plan to maintain a similar cycle in the spring, with the addition of a couple of new classes -- probably one on Web GIS and another on the new version of ArcInfo. I must thank all our excellent instructors for their solid contribution to the GISC's central mission of raising the campus community's level of expertise. Thanks are also owed to Rain Simar who manages all the paperwork and correspondence involved in keeping those courses running.
     
  • a spatial data clearinghouse. Over the past few years, John Radke and his students have collected a large volume of spatial data for the local region, but until recently it has been scattered around many different computer disks and not been properly cataloged. Bijan Khazai has spent the past few months building metadata and putting in the framework for an official FGDC Clearinghouse node. There's still some work to do on this, but the end result will be to make all this ready-to-use data available to the campus community. Once we've got our own shop in order, we'll be reaching out to include other spatial data on campus. Eventually, we hope the Library will take over this data library task by hiring one or more Librarians with expertise in digital spatial data. But for now, we're doing what we can to make existing data resources available.
     
  • a campus GIS. A small prototype project, spearheaded by Katherine Mortimer, is integrating all the spatial data she can get her hands on about the campus itself into a common GIS framework. Discussions with various campus administration units suggest that this small project may someday be part of fully integrated Campus Facilities Management Information System which incorporates information collected by all units about their campus-based activities and indexes it all to location.
     
  • a faculty network. Since GIS reaches across virtually all disciplinary boundaries on campus, there is a large and growing group of faculty who are finding colleagues in other departments interested in similar spatial problems or contexts. Opportunities for innovative, collaborative research are many and, thanks to John Radke's input, GISC has already participated in several grant proposals. I have spent quite a bit of time this fall trying to build an information network for these faculty and their researchers which facilitates interdisciplinary discussion.
     
  • a Professional GIS Certificate Program through UC Berkeley Extension. We've hired a Project Manager, Michelle Cobb, and will be putting together an Advisory Board and a curriculum in the next few months. We hope to have a couple of classes ready for summer 2000 with the full program starting in the fall. Information will be posted on this website soon.
     
  • a new website. Thanks to Margaret Nguyen who has spent the past couple of months building a whole new look for our website, the one you are now enjoying, built around a new and classic logo designed by Kimberly White.
     
  • improving our facilities. In July, finally (!), the GISC moved into our own space in 102 Wheeler. This gave us room for small reception and meeting areas and to organize our staff desks more effectively. The best part for me is that my office is now in the same place as the other GISC staff (makes communication a lot more efficient).  As well, our newest instructional lab, in 525 McCone, jointly managed with the Department of Geography, is now fully equipped with 12 new NT computers and almost ready for action. We plan to use it for the first time on GIS Day. This lab is the third in our set of shared instructional labs, the others are in 124 Mulford (with ESPM) and C30 Hearst Field Annex (with LAEP). Thanks to Mu Lan, Mintai Kim, James Davison and Angus (U Chi) Chang for their technical support and, of course, to Bob Campbell who John Radke coaxed out of retirement to get our UNIX systems back on-line.
     
  • even more technical infrastructure improvements. Thanks to a large donation from Sun Microsystems, we recently received one of their e450 models which will soon be the powerhouse and file archive for the GISC. A generous donation from Microsoft has also given us full licenses for NT operating system, Office 2000 and various programming languages (including Visual Basic which is becoming the prime programming environment for all ESRI products).  Jennie Ko has been a big help in bringing our software distribution program under control. If you want to get access to any of the ESRI software we manage under our campus site license, please drop by when Jennie is supervising our software desk.
     
  • unfortunately, we're still looking for the ideal person to become the lead technical member of our management team. We need a senior UNIX/NT Systems Administrator who can design, implement, and manage the Center's distributed computing infrastructure, and provide technical support for all our campus clients. More information here.

So, it has been a very busy semester for us. Next semester I'm looking forward to having time to be more proactive in following up on the many excellent suggestions we receive on how we can improve our service to everyone in the campus community. If you want to make your own suggestions, or perhaps you want to get involved with the center, please contact me.

Geography matters!

Karen K. Kemp
GISC Executive Director

November 12, 1999