What it's for
Any project that involves where things are: a watershed analysis for an ecology course, a service-area study for a planning capstone, a site-suitability model for a business class. The lab keeps a curated catalogue of Valley and statewide layers so students aren't each hunting the same shapefiles.
Support
A lab assistant with GIS coursework behind them holds hours for the “my projection is wrong and nothing lines up” class of problem; the library's data staff help with sourcing and licensing public data.
In and around Porter Falls
The Technology Help Desk is on the first floor of the Jarvis Technology Center. One student identity signs into MyPorter, the learning environment, campus Wi-Fi, printing and the library.
The practical details
Location: Founders Hall, Room 105. Software: The full desktop GIS suite plus open-source tools, on every machine. Data: A campus catalogue of regional layers, plus help pulling public datasets. Anything time-sensitive — an accommodation, a booking, a deadline — is worth confirming directly before you rely on it, because the specifics here can change from term to term.
If you have a question
The office behind this is Technology Help Desk (Jarvis Technology Center, Room 105). Call (715) 555–0120 or email helpdesk@uwporterfalls.edu during the fall and spring terms, or sign in to MyPorter to send a message or book a time. If it turns out another office owns the question, they will route it rather than send you back to the start.
Fictional information
UW–Porter Falls is a work of parody. Every office, person, building, phone number and statistic on this page is invented; nothing here describes a real institution or a service you can actually contact.