I have thought of myself as a human geographer since I was an undergraduate, and have been involved with maps all my life. My involvement with GIS at W&L is chronicled in a series of Web pages covering nearly five years, but also reaches back to work I did more than 20 years ago, and to speculative documents I wrote as I prepared for doctoral fieldwork more than 30 years ago.

My participation in ACS development began with the Boot Camp at Trinity University, and has included consulting at University of Richmond, travels to other ACS campuses with GIS activity, and continues with planning of the next GIS symposium at Southwestern.

GIS support is found in libraries at several of the institutions I visited, though it is not usually librarians who seek or assume the responsibility (Brandeis is one exception, where the impetus for GIS came from within the library). In some cases (Williams is a good example) GIS support is a part of the responsibilities of an IT person, but other demands on her time reduce the degree to which she can develop and promulgate GIS across disciplines. A few institutions (Mount Holyoke, Smith, Middlebury) have dedicated GIS labs and full-time support personnel. While the obvious home for GIS is Geology and Geography departments, the technology is being used very widely by other disciplines, many of which are within or closely linked to the sciences, but spatial data are increasingly available in the humanities and social sciences. Most of the skills required for science use are directly applicable to applications in other fields.