About
I launched Gothos: A Geospatial Librarian’s World, in March 2008 as a place for me to keep track of data sources I found and processes or applications I did and wanted to remember. Keeping this in a blog allowed me to keep track of everything fairly easily and to share this info with anyone in the wider world who cared to follow.
The goal was to cover topics like geographic information systems (GIS), maps, cartography, geographic information literacy, demographic data, data sources, data processing, and librarianship. In practice many of my posts have taken the form of reviews for data sources or tutorials for performing some operation in GIS or cleaning up data. US Census data, open source GIS, sources for free GIS data, and hacking away at stuff in Excel have been the primary topics I’ve covered in my posts; I occasionally blog about ArcGIS, books about GIS, and NYC-related resources. The type and volume of posts is driven by the projects I’m currently engaged in, and how busy (or distracted) I am at work.
I’ve been the Geospatial Data Librarian at Baruch College CUNY in midtown Manhattan since the fall of 2007. I have master’s degrees in geography and library and information science and have worked in state government as a regional planner and GIS person and in academic libraries as a GIS and data librarian. I started using GIS in 1997 as a 2nd year undergraduate geography and history major, plotting Viking attacks on Irish monasteries in the 9th century using ArcView 3.x while drinking copious amounts of Guinness.
My personal geography: I’m one of the world’s few Delawareans (it’s a small state) and am now one of the world’s few uptown Manhattanites (only 1.25 out of 10 Manhattanites live above 155th St). Despite all this I still consider myself to be a Philadelphian; I root for the Phillies and yearn for soft pretzels.
Anyway – I hope you find, and have found, this blog useful. You can see some of my other resources and goings-on via the research guides I’ve created for my campus.
While this site was originally conceived as a blog, I’ve disabled most of the blog-like functions (comments, membership) because I spent most of my time fighting spam and malware rather than actually communicating with people. Feel free to bookmark, link, subscribe to the feed, or send me an email.
- Frank
