Hi everybody, I’m Jaime Martindale and I’m the Map and Geospatial Data Librarian in the Geography department at UW–Madison. I’ve been in the Geography department since 2003, and prior to coming to UW I was the GIS Librarian at Cornell University. So I’ve spent my entire career managing map and geospatial data collections.

I run the Arthur H. Robinson Map Library, which is part of the Geography department, and is a worldwide cartographic research collection.

The print collection contains over half a million items, including 270 thousand map sheets, and the largest collection of historic aerial photographs for the state of Wisconsin. In addition to curating and providing access to the print collection, I also do a lot of work with GIS data.

So we typically collect local Wisconsin GIS data and make it available through a campus geoportal. So students and researches have direct download access to the information they need for their coursework and teaching. The map library on campus supports the subject areas of cartography, GIS, remote sensing, so those are also my subject area specialties, and I support all data and software in those areas.

I also teach introductory GIS workshops, and help students and researchers find data for course assignments and more in-depth research projects. I also do a fair amount of consulting with students on how to formulate an overall plan for a mapping project, and best practices for geospatial project management, focusing on data management and metadata. So my primary role on campus is to help you as students find geospatial data that you need for your coursework, assignments, and for your research projects. So please don’t hesitate to reach out and visit the Robinson map library’s website, contact me directly if you have questions about how to find data, or other research resources in general the UW libraries provide. I look forward to working with you, I wish you the best of luck in your studies.