The USF Libraries COVID-19 Hub was created in March 2020 to provide geospatial data, applications, and tools that could help track, monitor, and support data analysis and research on COVID-19 in Florida. A resource guide to GIS data, mapping tools, news, and related information about Florida’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was established and is integrated with USF Libraries Digital Collections. Creating archival content with these data became very important since the State of Florida only provided daily and occasional updates in a table format that were overwritten and replaced previous dates instead of archiving this information. Additionally, data was not readily provided in spatial or GIS formats, and our process entailed taking tabular data and creating accessible and curated spatial formats.
In June 2021, the State of Florida stopped sharing detailed data, making it impossible to update some of our real-time dashboards. Unfortunately, since then, many other data sources that provided COVID-19 metrics have also become unavailable and have been removed from the internet. As a result, we have decided to transform the Florida COVID-19 Hub into a more focused archive-based research database. The updated hub site will provide a valuable resource for those who are studying the spread of COVID-19 in Florida.
