The Real and the Virtual. The Internet and the Environment. Search for Identity. Once the province of astronomers, land planners, and geoscientists, geospatial data and the tools to analyze it have become increasingly available and valuable to scholars from many disciplines.
Agricultural specialists examine trends by laying data on deforestation patterns over regional maps.
A market researcher uses geospatial data to discover the characteristics of people who buy a certain product and find out where they live so a certain product can be marketed in local stores. As a result, libraries that house GIS tools are dealing with a growing number of users, says Tom Parris, environmental resources librarian with the social sciences program at Harvard College Library. Parris, who compares the rise of GIS use in academia to that of the science of statistics after World War II, says the change is due in large part to access. They needed a PC decked out with the best memory, the largest monitor, the fastest processor. That was beyond the reach of many researchers.