GIS Facilities

Our Cartography Laboratory, housed in the Department of Geography, is one of the most advanced in the nation and has extensive experience in mapping census tracts and historical counties.

Additionally, the Automated Cartographic Information Center within the Borchert Map Library maintains a state-of-the-art GIS facility including digital copies of all Census Bureau electronic maps.  The Geography Department is also home to the oldest and largest Master of Geographic Information Science (MGIS) program in the country.

Available equipment include:  a Calcomp ScanPlus IV 36 inch color scanner; a Hewlett-Packard designjet 5500 42 inch color plotter; a Nikon Coolscan 4000 slide and film scanner; 10 high-end PCs running Windows (XP or Server 2003); two PCs running Linux; a Sunblade 100; an Apple dual-processor Power Mac G4; and a Cisco Catalyst 3750 that manages the local gigabit subnetwork. Software includes ArcGIS (ESRI), Surfer (Golden Software), MAPublisher (Avenza), various drawing packages (FreeHand, Illustrator, PhotoShop, FontLab), various software development packages (e.g., Visual Studio, Visio, SourceSafe), and various statistical packages (e.g., SAS, S-Plus, R, GeoDa).