Street map shows Waterloo Region growth

The Map Library has completed a digitization project that dramatically shows how street networks across Waterloo Region have changed and grown, says Eva Dodsworth, whose title — “geospatial data services librarian” — shows that there’s a lot more to a map library than just paper maps.

A key example: in 1955, Dearborn Street, on the outskirts of Waterloo, ran dead straight in a westerly direction uphill from King Street. Two years later, something called the University of Waterloo was created. Now, what was Dearborn is “University Avenue”, the city’s longest street, which skirts the campus in a graceful curve. The original line of Dearborn Street is barely preserved in a walkway along the south side of Engineering 2 and a hallway on the ground floor of Needles Hall.

"We have not only historical name changes,” Dodsworth explains, "but evidence of changes in urban development, street lines and trails.”

The background to the project is work done in 2008, when Map Library staff scanned and georeferenced more than 2,000 historical air photos of the Region of Waterloo, releasing them to the public in KML and image format. Thousands across the world have visited the project’s website, she says, to explore the visual history of the region.

“Map Library staff have recently completed a second phase of the project — creating a historical street map for the Region of Waterloo. Made available in the user-friendly KML format (viewable in Google Earth), users can download the 1955 street file and analyze changes of city boundaries, urban growth, and of course the street network.”

Dodsworth says some of the observations she and her colleagues have made in analyzing the historical street map include a “dramatic” expansion of urban built-up areas over half a century. The changes are obvious in a map of Waterloo and Kitchener (left), where grey indicates the streets of an earlier generation and pink the ones that have been added: “Urban built-up area increased by 537%, from 38 square km in 1955 to 202 square km in 2011. The rapid urban expansion mostly occurred in the suburbs.

“Between 1955 and 2011, the total road length for the Region of Waterloo has increased from 2,175 km to 3,626 km, an increase of 66%. Most of the new roads were built in the suburban areas of Cambridge, Kitchener and Waterloo (from 813 km to 2,073 km).”

At the same time, she says, many country and farm roads either disappeared or changed shape. “In built-up areas, the street network largely remains the same; however, some street names have changed. Having historical street names available allows one to pinpoint historical locations like the boardroom of Waterloo College at Dearborn and Albert. New roads were built in the rural areas along rural/farm roads. Sometimes a small part of these old roads remains today as trails.”

The street map files, she says, were created by using a GIS program to analyze the street network visible in the 1955 air photos that the Library had previously digitized and georeferenced. “Instead of manually drawing the streets in, staff worked with a current (2010) street network map as a baseline, and deleted all newer streets and then recreated the historical ones. Street names were assigned to the street files by checking against a georeferenced 1955 Kitchener and Waterloo city map.”

The Waterloo County Historical Street Project is now online, and users can download the KML files and view the streets in Google Earth “to accurately compare the past and the present”.

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News briefs and a couple of umbrellas

Registration has opened for WatITis, the once-a-year one-day conference that brings together information technology staff from across campus. It’ll be held, as usual, on the day after fall term classes end (that makes it Tuesday, December 6). Sessions cover the gamut of things IT staff might want to know about, from “the power of LinkedIn” to “intrusion detection”, “how to embed a microcontroller into anything”, and the transition from the Angel course management system (UW-ACE) to Desire2Learn. And I will be giving a talk myself: “A Writer’s 40-Year Love-Hate Relationship with Waterloo Information Technology”. It’s scheduled last thing in the afternoon, right before participants head over to the Graduate House for “fun and fellowship”. “We have representatives from Maplesoft, Apple and Microsoft giving presentations this year,” adds Lowell Williamson, IT specialist in applied health sciences and co-chair of the conference along with Ed Chrzanowski of the Computer Science Computing Facility. Information and registration are online.

I had another opportunity to stand in front of an audience in late October, as part of a training and development day for some 50 staff in the cleaning services arm of housing and residences. I know nothing about housecleaning, but I spoke (in the Needles Hall boardroom) about the university’s history, traditions and achievements. “In addition to providing some job-specific safety training thanks to Doug Dye and the Safety Office,” says Mike Iley of housing, “our Cleaning Services management team really wanted to help emphasize the important role our staff play in helping students succeed. Pam Charbonneau, director of student experience in the Student Success Office, helped drive this point home in her presentation on student development theory by highlighting how Cleaning Services staff help students by not only providing a clean, comfortable environment where students can excel and develop, but also by the role staff play in helping to build community. Also, we aimed to highlight the breadth of our campus and the many things Waterloo students do while not spending their time in residence.” The afternoon included brief visits to the Dana Porter Library, the Earth Sciences museum, and the Student Design Centre in Engineering 5. Pictured, on the steps of E5, are three of the participants: Peter Jordan, Lisa Williamson and Carol Stewart.

Eva Grabinski, who heads the university’s Web Content Management System, announced yesterday that the Faculty of Environment website has been launched in the university’s new WCMS. It is, she says, “the first of five early adopter websites to be launched in the WCMS before the New Year. The other sites are Housing and Residences; the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences; a web-resources site for the university that will provide training and support information for the WCMS; and the university homepage including related web pages. After that, migration of the university’s other 1,000-plus websites will start to get underway in January 2012. As the WCMS project lead, I would like to thank the WCMS team and Environment for the super work that everyone did to make this launch happen.” For those who want to know more about the migration of the Environment website into the WCMS, the people involved in the project will be sharing their experiences at the IST Friday morning seminar on December 2.

“What happens,” the drama department’s publicity is asking, “when we leave our own daily reality and visit a foreign land where the rules and structures are different?” The answer — well, one answer anyway — comes through the department’s new production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, opening tonight (Correction: Wednesday) with a 7:00 preview performance for alumni and other VIPs. The show, being mounted in the Theatre of the Arts, opens to the public tomorrow (Correction: Thursday). There will be six 8 p.m. performances (November 10-12 and 17-19) plus two matinees for high school students, on the 17th and 18th. Anne-Marie Donovan of drama is the director.

December 19 is the deadline, and if you’re a student who will be registering for courses in the winter term, you might want to make note of it. That’s the date by which fees for the term must be “arranged”, which means either paid in full, or covered by a promissory note. “Effective winter 2012, there is only one due date for all forms of payment,” says Loron Pellowe, supervisor of student accounts, who says the previous system of one due date for some kinds of paperwork and another for bank transfers was causing “a considerable amount of confusion for students and parents”. Meeting the December 19 date, which falls a few days before the Christmas holidays begin, “will give ample time,” she says, “for students who meet the deadline to be Fees Arranged on the first day of class and have access to courses on Desire2Learn. The Winter 2012 Promissory Note will become available once fees are posted to individual student accounts on Quest around November 21. We'll send a blast email out once the fees are actually posted to student accounts.”

And . . . yesterday’s Daily Bulletin mentioned “Colleen Barnes” of counselling services as one of the Waterloo staff members who are retiring this fall (as of November 1). Wrong. “Although Barnes is a lovely surname,” she writes, “I have had the name of Bernard since May 20, 1967, when I was married.” The same Daily Bulletin said Waterloo has been "research university of the year" in its category for "the fifth straight year". That's not quite right either: Waterloo has topped the listings five years out of the past six.

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A final note from, and about, the editor

Today’s issue of the Daily Bulletin is the last one for which I will be the editor. I will be retiring from Waterloo early in the new year, and before that happens, the university has arranged that I can spend a few months working on some historical projects, which I’m very much looking forward to. I’ll continue to be based in the Communications and Public Affairs office.

For the immediate future, the Daily Bulletin will be in the hands of an interim editor, Brandon Sweet, whose office is next door to mine here in Needles Hall. The department’s intention is to advertise the newly defined position of associate director (internal communications) and Daily Bulletin editor, and hire someone as soon as possible.

Material for the Daily Bulletin can, as always, be e-mailed to bulletin@ uwaterloo.ca, and the publication will continue to appear online at 9 a.m. every working day.

I have been editing the Daily Bulletin through more than 4,500 issues now since it was created in the spring of 1993. Originally the Daily Bulletin was distributed by “gopher”. In the spring of 1995 the first Web versions of the Daily Bulletin were tried out. In 1998, the “Link of the Day” was introduced; in 1999, the use of photos became a regular occurrence. The “When and Where” events listings began in 2003, and the present graphic design dates mostly from 2006.

Before the electronic age, I was editor of the university’s printed Gazette for three decades starting in 1973 (it ceased publication in 2004). So I have seen a great deal of Waterloo’s life and growth, its highs and lows, all of which I have tried to reflect in these publications, and some of which I’ll revisit as I do some historical writing over these next weeks.

Now a word from Ellen Réthoré, the associate vice-president (communications and public affairs), which she told me I had to include here: “I want to thank Chris personally, and on behalf of all of us at Waterloo, for his extraordinary 38 years of service to Waterloo. He has been responsible for creating a shared community for this campus, first through the Gazette and in recent decades through the Daily Bulletin. We're delighted that Chris will be able to spend the next few months before his retirement next year to gather the stories he knows, and pass along his wisdom about what makes Waterloo such a unique institution. All of us, and future generations of Waterloo students, staff, and faculty, will benefit from knowing more about our history as we grow into our better future.”

Me again: I don’t know of any other university that has a service quite like the Daily Bulletin, with news of every kind, from research to shenanigans, published every day in the same place and in the same voice. A web communications consultant last year called it “quaint”. Perhaps now changes are ahead, but I am pretty confident they’ll be made in response to the needs and wishes of this particular campus community, which, in so many ways, is unlike any other university anywhere.

I’ve tried to tell the Waterloo story truthfully, clearly and engagingly, and to a gratifying degree the university’s leaders have rewarded me when I did. I have reported to great managers (all the way back to silver-maned Jack Adams, who hired me in 1973), worked with great colleagues, and enjoyed a lively and supportive relationship with great readers. So the most important thing I want to say in this final Daily Bulletin is a very simple one: to managers, co-workers and readers alike, thank you.

CAR

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