This study gives highly specific information on who, how much and how faculty are using many different geographic information sources including but not limited to: map/geographic info libraries (with separate data sets for in-person visits and online access), Google Maps, Google Earth, Planet.com, aerial photographs, OpenMaps and other resources. The study also presents detailed assessment data on how satisfied faculty are with the geographic information sources available at their college or university libraries, how important these assets are to their work, and how aware respondents are of the availability of geographic information and its relevance for their scholarship and teaching. In addition, the report looks at attitudes towards the growing availability and quality of digitized geographic information, and new means of exploiting it.
Just a few of this 125-page report’s many findings are that:
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Approximately 15.5% of US higher education faculty consider geographic information to be very or extremely important in their work.
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17.65% of history faculty are dissatisfied with the geographic information resources available at their college or university library.
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16% of male faculty use aerial photographs in their teaching or scholarship.
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Nearly 85% of faculty in earth/environmental sciences use Google Earth in their work.
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Approximately 41% of department chair, deans and distinguished professors say that they know nearly nothing about their university’s geographic information resources.
The data is derived from a representative sample of 731 higher education faculty in the USA. It presented in the aggregate and also broken out by institutional characteristics of the respondent's institutions such as enrollment sizes, Carnegie classes, public or private status, and tuition levels, as well as by some personal characteristics of the respondents, such as their age, gender, academic field, and other variables.