The GIF, based in the College of Natural Resources, serves a wide variety of needs for geospatial analysis on campus.
Hardware & Software
GIF has several computers available for geospatial work, helps maintain the College of Natural Resources' Teaching Lab, and also offers large-format printing services. UC students, faculty, and staff are eligible for a GIF user account at no charge. User account privileges include 24/7 access to computers in 111 Mulford Hall via Cal 1 Card entry and 1 GB of data storage on a private network folder.
UC students, faculty, and staff can download a free 1-year education edition of ArcGIS for Desktop through the GIF. Note: ArcGIS is only available on PC. See our guide to installing Windows 8 on a Mac (forthcoming).
Training
GIF offers 4-hour intensive introductions to topics such as ArcGIS, open source GIS (QGIS), and creating web maps. Workshops are designed for participants with little or no experience and provide a solid foundation for working with these tools. Workshops are available at a subsidized rate of $84 for all UC students (graduate and undergraduate), faculty, and staff.
The GIF offers a number of PDF guides for getting started in GIS. Free online training on a variety of GIS topics (e.g. understanding geographic data", introductions to GIS, Python scripting for automatizing workflows) is also available through the GIF.
Advising & Consulting
Students, faculty, and staff can sign up for 30-minute advising appointments via Google Calendar. More in-depth consulting for complex geospatial projects are available at $84 per hour for all UC affiliates (students, faculty, and staff).
Community
GIF regularly hosts the Geolunch seminar series, which features interesting talks, group discussion, and show-and-tells involving geospatial theory, research, and application.
The GIF also maintains the GIS @ Berkeley website, which features student work with GIS, upcoming workshops, job postings, and information about the GIST graduate certificate and GIS undergraduate minor.