Policies for Geospatial Collections: a Research in US and Canadian Academic Libraries

Abstract

Geographic information is essential to economical and political implications. Τhe technological development of recent years and the simplicity of many applications have made it part of everyday life of citizens. It is common to libraries, especially those who serve departments interested in geographic content to organize such collections and provide services to their users. The rapid diffusion of free data in the internet and the growth of open access software have begun to affect libraries in adopting policies related to the collections and services of GIS. The work presented in this paper seeks, through the investigation of geospatial collection development policies’ of 21 academic libraries in United States and Canada to identify those characteristics reflecting their adaptation to the new era of open data.