Sautter Award Winner: American Viticultural Areas Digitizing (NEWLY ADDED SESSION)
Libraries are increasingly involved in providing data management and GIS services, consultations, project collaboration, and creating open digital data collections. In this talk, Michele will discuss the American Viticulture Areas (AVA) Project and address how the tools and workflows used to create and manage this dataset can be repurposed for other data collections with multiple contributors with limited infrastructure and funding.
The AVA Project began as a collaboration between UC Davis and UCSB to create digital spatial data for all 240 boundaries of the American Viticulture Areas as described in the US ATPF Code of Regulations in support of key research conducted at our institutions. The AVA Project utilizes user-contribution practices in the GIS community that have successfully generated open-licensed global datasets like Open Street Map combined with US government documents, open data formats (geoJSON), open source GIS software (QGIS), and collaboration tools (GitHub) to provide a high-quality open and accessible research resource. The project provides the dataset free of charge through a system that accepts contributions, corrections, and updates. The methods employed in the AVA Project provide a framework for managing other collaborative data creation projects, including contributions from multiple campuses as well as entities outside the UC.