History

The Geographic Information Systems area within Facilities Management has been functional since 1998. The lab originated through a joint effort between the Maintenance Services and Landscape Services units. In order to do this, Facilities Management purchased two Trimble TSC1 GPS Receivers and joined in University software licenses for Trimble Pathfinder Pro and ESRI geographic information systemssoftware.

The area was originally operated by students from the Department of Geography and College of Engineering and Applied Sciences with oversight from Facilities Management. Many students have cycled through the geographic information systems lab and tackled a host of projects including maintenance issues, such as updating the locations of campus utilities and landscape projects such as a tree inventory, snow plow routing and mapping of the in-ground irrigation system.

A tree inventory was conducted by geographic information system student staff with the help of a WMU Geography field methods class. Maintenance Services has completed initial mapping of the electrical, storm, sanitary, steam and condensate, and water systems. Jointly, the landscape and maintenance students work together to obtain satellite and aerial imagery and maintain the campus base map.

In 2008, Facilities Management created the full time staff position of Geographic Information Systems Manager; the area continues to employ two to four students. The area has been principally responsible in providing internship quality experience for placing students in professional level geographic information systems positions. Along with this growth, the area has seen a shifting focus from data creation to data maintenance and analysis.

The geographic information system data is made available on the Web through an ArcIMS (internet mapping solutions) application with the assistance from Facilities Management's Network Services. The site has both public and secure "staff only" mapping sites. The staff site allows the Facilities Management staff to view the location and information about campus infrastructure from any computer terminal. This is currently available in the geographic information systems maps portion of this site.