GIS entered the academic library in the mid-1990s by the efforts of the Association of Research Libraries Geographic Information System Literacy Project, which attempted to help librarians understand GIS software and data sources as well.
An agricultural professor who had worked on this ARL project was also a part of the project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) to compile a comprehensive base map of the state of Illinois. The professor wanted to make sure that the products of the project were not lost after they left, acknowledging that GIS use at the university wasn't terribly coordinated at the time.
The following questions were asked about GIS use in agriculture and also at UIUC:
- Within the discipline of agriculture, what GIS software is being used?
- What types of data sets are needed and available?
- Who are the users of GIS?
- At the university, who are the local users?
- What research is being done that incorporates GIS?
- What instruction is being done that incorporates GIS?
- Are there common software programs or data sets being used?
Two studies were crafted, the using the Current Contents database to explore GIS use as a whole in the institution, and the other to search for "Geographic Information Systems" and "GIS" in the CAB Abstracts database. These are bibliographic databases from 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000.
Subject codes were drafted to categorize the articles (some articles fell into multiple subject codes as GIS use tends to be very interdisciplinary). 18 codes were used in the first study, and 30 in the second study. Results for the first study can be seen in the two tables below:
Although "Agriculture" holds its own category, it may be noted that agriculture itself spans many disciplines, and other subject codes like "Atmospheric Science" and "Geoscience" could broadly relate. Results from the second study can be seen below:
Clearly, GIS use in agriculture spans more than just precision agriculture. More study in the future, the author says, could be taken in the area of these interdisciplinary to further understand the connections between subject areas, and also in creating sub-codes for the codes with the most citations.
Source: Allen, Robert S. "Use Of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) In Agriculture: A Bibliometric Analysis." Quarterly Bulletin Of The International Association Of Agricultural Information Specialists 50.3/4 (2005): 129-132. Library Literature & Information Science Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 14 Feb. 2012.
What a cool and simple analysis to uncover these connections. This type of information analysis is exactly what we are doing in a geographic context. The author of this paper did "data mining" to find the citations, then he organized/manipulated/analyzed the data in meaningful ways to draw conclusions. This process he did follows the same lines of investigation that we will do, but we take a Geographic context and index into the analysis. We add the question of "where?"
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