by Rain Simar

The Geographic Information Science Center began in late 1997 when our current director, Professor John Radke of the Landscape and Environmental Planning, and City and Regional Planning Departments in the College of Environmental Design, recognized the need for a central GIS unit that serves the campus. He researched other models of GIS units in Universities across the nation and realized that they all had one common flaw: they all operated from a specific department or a specific college within the university.

He states, "Most of them identified the lack of interdisciplinary cooperation as the greatest disappointment in their centers." John Radke's concept of a unit that would belong to no department, but to the university as whole, equally serving the GIS needs throughout the campus took form, and became a reality when it was approved by Chancellor Berdahl and Vice Chancellor Nick Jewel, and was given start-up funds of $750,000, with a promise of additional funding in the next two years.

The Center was built to serve the campus in several areas. The first is education and training. Our unit was put into place to train academic, administrative, and service units in GIS. Many units on campus use GIS, but are unfamiliar with many aspects of it, and lack training. And still others are unaware of how much GIS would help their work or research. Others use GIS and are anxious to have their staff trained in the use of it as well. Units that benefit from use of GIS include service units such as UC Police, Capital Projects, Space Planning, and others. Academic departments who use GIS in research include City and Regional Planning, Social Welfare, ESPM, School of Public Health, Anthropology, Archaeology, and East Asian studies among others. The uses of GIS are limitless, and it is our intention to reach out and educate the campus in the use of GIS, and to train staff working with GIS, and students or faculty using GIS in their research. Indeed, many have benefited from our unit, and outreach plans to draw in other service, administrative, and academic departments are ever developing.