In June of last year Dr. Michael Glassow, Dr. Mark Aldenderfer and I hosted a conference at UCSB to discuss the potential of a unified GIS for the Information Center system. Prior to that, there was no coordinated effort to develop a geographic information system (GIS) for managing the culture resource data housed at the twelve regional Information Centers run by the California's Office of Historic Preservation (OHP). That conference gave rise to the CHROnICLE (California Historic Resources On-line Information Center Locational Environment) project, an initiative to build a unified historic resources GIS for California. The central hub computer for this project will be housed in the Central Coast Information Center here at UCSB.

For over a decade, since the twelve Information Centers were established, database operations have relied largely on manual techniques to manage and distribute information. These techniques, however, are quickly becoming inadequate as the complexity of the databases has grown. New approaches for data management are urgent to avoid inefficiency and even data loss. The solution to the Centers data complexity problem is to improve the efficiency of its database management by developing a GIS.

GIS systems are computer applications and hardware designed to manage and analyze spatial databases. For instance, an object representing an archaeological site in a GIS map can be cross-referenced using a relational database to the age of that site, its distance from the nearest water source, or whatever variable the user desires. The type of GIS that the Information Center system has implemented is a vector-based system, which stores mapped data as a series of layers consisting of polygons, lines, regions, or points that represent real world objects.

The data entered at the eleven Information Centers will be collected and stored at a central hub housed UCSB. This hub will allow 24 hour access to the State database via the Internet and modem hook-ups. The Santa Barbara hub is being created in cooperation with the Alexandria Project, an NSF-funded initiative based at UCSB developing an electronic library of environmental and spatial data. The Alexandria project will offer the central hub's clients a friendly and sophisticated interface for accessing the Centers' GIS database. In return, the hub project has offered itself and its data as a test case for the Alexandria initiative.

UCSB anthropology graduate students will benefit from this development in a number ways:

* a new half-time employment position in the center.

* the opportunity for students to gain experience with GIS

* the development of this program will help place our department at the forefront of GIS application in anthropology, attracting quality graduate students and greater departmental recognition.

Editor's note: Matt is now living in New York where he has a position working with GIS.

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