Sustaining a Spatial Collaboration: Leveraging Social Infrastructure to Support Technological Advancement in Geospatial Data Discovery

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) Geospatial Information Network (GIN) serves as a prime example of an enduring, successful collaboration across multiple institutions. The proliferation and significance of geospatial data have outpaced the development of adequate search tools and high-quality metadata, prompting the necessity for streamlined geospatial data discovery. In response, the BTAA-GIN established, maintains, and continuously enhances a geoportal that federates metadata from public geospatial data providers in addition to geospatial resources from member institutions. This article provides a reflective analysis of the evolution of the BTAA-GIN over the past nine years, an exploration of the ever-shifting open-source technology landscape, possible future directions and potential expansions of scope, and highlights key features contributing to its success. Examining the trajectory of the BTAA-GIN and the factors behind its achievements yields valuable insights for comparable large-scale, multi-institutional endeavors.