Mission
and Purpose
The Santee Cooper Geographic
Information Systems Laboratory (SCGIS) is a center for excellence in
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing at the College
of Charleston / University
of Charleston.
The Santee Cooper GIS Laboratory
is available to members of the College/University of Charleston
community. The laboratory supports undergraduate, graduate and faculty
teaching and research at the college. The laboratory currently supports
the activities of 15 affiliated faculty researchers and over 30 student
researchers. Each semester courses are offered in GIS, remote sensing,
or geologic / environmental modeling / computing at both the
undergraduate and graduate level.
Undergraduate and graduate
courses in GIS and Remote Sensing have been taught to a broad range of
students in disciplines ranging from Geology, Biology, Marine Biology,
Public Administration, Architecture, Community Planning, Business,
Policy, Epidemiology, Risk Assessment and more. In
addition, several presentations for other undergraduate, graduate and
continuing education courses have also been hosted in the “smart lab”
as well as a variety of Master’s Thesis and Internship defenses for the
University of Charleston’s Master’s of Environmental Studies (MES)
program.
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History of the Laboratory
The Santee Cooper GIS Laboratory
was dedicated on May 20, 1997
by the Santee Cooper Electric Cooperative as an example of their
dedication to the company’s mission of “Improving the quality of
life for the people of South
Carolina”.
Santee Cooper Electric
Cooperative provided the College
of Charleston
with a one-time grant of $150,000 in 1997. This
generous grant was leveraged with additional resources from software
and hardware companies to provide the most widely used GIS and remote
sensing equipment for our students.
The lab now receives part of the
annual budget for the Geology Department in the School
of Science
and Math to offset the annual maintenance and upgrade costs for both
the hardware and software.
To date, more than 5,800
students have signed in to work in the lab during its 12 semesters of
operation.
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Facilities
The laboratory is located in Room 114
of the Rita Liddy Hollings Science Center on the main campus of the College of Charleston. The Laboratory is a “smart-lab”
equipped with ergonomic 21 Nova Desks with recessed monitor shelves and
keyboard trays, an overhead projector and sound system, and variable
lighting.
The student and teacher station
computers were upgraded to DELL Pentium 5 workstations this past summer.
A new GIS data server will be added to the network
this fall. The existing server will be used as a redundant data server
and an ArcIMS Map and Image server for
internet mapping applications. There are two printers, a large format
scanner and a large format plotter accessible to the laboratory.
Each computer station has zip drives and CD writers
available for the students to export their data. Two DVD burners are
available for data archiving purposes.
Software installed in the lab
includes the latest versions of ESRI’s GIS
software: ArcGIS 8.3, ArcView,
and the supporting extensions; Image Analyst, 3D Analyst, Spatial
Analyst and a variety of tabular and image data. Remote
sensing and image processing software includes RSI’s
IDL/ENVI and Photoshop 7.0. Other software in
support of classes being taught in the lab includes: Mathworks MATLAB, Visual MODFLOW Pro 3.0 For
student projects, Microsoft Office 2000, Adobe Acrobat 5.0, Macromedia DreamWeaver
is installed, and each computer is connected to the internet via a
100bT line to a T-1 external connection. Both
Internet Explorer and Netscape are available to the lab user.
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