GIS Day on Wednesday November 19th

The Map Library and the Faculty of Environment are hosting UW's fifth annual GIS Day Event between 11:30 and 2:30 in the EV1 couryard tomorrow. There are lots of great activities planned for tomorrow including poster presentations, cake, door prizes and a hands-on GPS and Google Earth session. Please register for the event at : http://www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/gisday/2008/

Student Licenses for ArcGIS at $25.00

Students can now get a one-year ArcGIS software license for $25.00. Students, if you require your own copy of the program for academic purposes, please contact Sandra Laughlin in IST to purchase a copy.

Sandra Laughlin
Info Systems and Technology MC 2008
Mail: laughlin@ist.uwaterloo.ca

Collection Update

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps : Trial until November 25th, 2008

The Map Library is pleased to offer you for a limited time trial access to the American Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, 1867-1970. These large-scale plans provide extensive building and property information including building outline, size, shape and construction materials, height, location of windows, doors and more. Buildings include residential, commercial, industrial and other. The maps also provide street names, street and sidewalk widths, property boundaries and house numbers. The collection consists of over 660,000 maps of 12,000 American cities and towns.

This collection is available from Proquest where the maps can be downloaded and printed in Adobe PDF. This resource can be found on the Library’s website by visiting the Research Databases page , click the letter S in the A-Z browse list, and scroll to Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps.

GIS Data Update :

DMTI

DMTI has released its v2008.3 CanMap datasets for Canada. The Library has also acquired a new product this year called Neighbourhood and Community Boundaries. The Neighbourhood Boundaries are only available in urban areas and Community Boundaries are available in both urban and rural areas. For more information, please visit DMTI Spatial.

City of Kitchener

The Map Library has received the annual update for Kitchener's Municipal data. Updated layers include building footprints, double and single line street network, landmarks, address points, surface waters, community trails, ward boundaries, zoning, etc.

UW Campus 2008

Received from UW Plant Operations, an updated version of UW campus data in DWG AutoCad format. Both the north and south campus is included in this 2008 update. Staff will convert the Cad files to GIS Shapefiles within the next several months.