Software
Bucknell has a site license for ESRI’s suite of GIS software products. The site license includes unlimited use of any of ESRI’s software products by Bucknell students and faculty for academic purposes. The site license also provides one-year time-out DVD copies of fully-functional ArcGIS desktop software (with all of the extensions) for Bucknell faculty and students to use on their own personal computers. You are allowed to get a new copy of the DVD every year that you are at Bucknell.
As of September 2011, ArcGIS 10 is installed on all classroom and lab computers at Bucknell. The installation includes the ArcInfo version of ArcGIS desktop software along with all of the available extensions (Spatial Analyst, 3D Analyst, Network Analyst, etc.). The installation also includes ArcHydro tools and the 3rd party extension ‘Hawth’s Tools.’ In addition to ArcGIS 10, all classroom and lab machines have GoogleEarth installed.
Bucknell Library & IT staff are currently in the process of developing a backend infrastructure to support the use of ArcGIS Server for serving/storing data and deploying web mapping applications. Stay tuned for more details.
Labs
ArcGIS 10 and GoogleEarth are currently installed on all classroom and lab computers.
Equipment
The GIS Specialist has a small collection of GPS devices available for loan to faculty and students to use in coursework or research projects. Currently we have the following devices:
- *NEW* 1 x Latitude E6400XFG ruggedized field laptop – **Available only to faculty or to students under direct faculty or GIS Specialist supervision**
- 1 x Trimble Pro XT external GPS device (real-time submeter
- 1 x Trimble GeoXH 2008 Handheld GPS device (real-time subfoot – 30 cm accuracy) – **Available only to faculty or to students under direct faculty or GIS Specialist supervision**
- 6 x Trimble JunoSB 2008 Handheld GPS device (2-5m in field, 1-3m post-processing accuracy).
- Auxiliary software required for capturing and post-processing GPS data are also available (including GPS Pathfinder Office s/w; TerraSync Professional s/w, GPS Correct for ArcPad s/w and GPS Analyst Extension for ArcGIS).
Data
A wide range of GIS datasets are stored on the GIS server and are available to faculty and students who have been assigned read priveleges on Xanthus. Please e-mail me to request access if you do not already have it.
Projects
All GIS projects and course assignments should be stored on the GIS server because…. (1) Xanthus offers a much larger storage quota and you won’t run out of space; (2) if your project is on Xanthus and you want to consult with me, I’ll be able to access your work and help you a lot more quickly/easily; and (3) Xanthus has regular back-ups and is a much safer place to store your work than… for example… an external hard drive.
Connecting to Xanthus
Here are the steps you’ll need to take to get access to the GIS data and project space on Xanthus:
(1) Contact me at jlg046@bucknell.edu to tell me what you’re up to and what you want access to on Xanthus.
(2) I’ll send an e-mail to the systems administrator and CC you. I’ll tell the sys admin what folder(s) you need access to. You need to wait for a response for the sys admin saying that your access priveleges have been assigned.
(3) Once you get that e-mail from the sys admin, you’ll need to log off and log back on to the Bucknell network in order for the permissions to take effect.
(4) To map a drive to Xanthus, you’ll need to navigate to my public folder on the faculty/staff drive [‘facultystaff on netspace’ T:\j\jlg046\public\] and click on the executable called ‘GISDrive.exe’
(5) The .exe will map a permanent drive to Xanthus so that no matter what machine you log into on campus you will see the drive. The drive will show up in My Computer as ‘gis on Xanthus’ G: drive
