Behind the Map

Monday

Mary Veres, Senior Manager, Communications/Marketing

How The University’s EGIS Team Helped Transform Navigation at the Tucson Festival of Books

Each year, when more than 130,000 visitors arrive on the University of Arizona campus for the Tucson Festival of Books, they expect to easily find author talks, food vendors, exhibits, and gathering spaces spread across dozens of buildings and hundreds of tents. What most attendees don’t see is the sophisticated mapping effort working quietly behind the scenes to make that experience possible.

For this year’s festival, the University of Arizona’s Enterprise Geographic Information Systems (EGIS) team helped transform how festival maps are created and used, shifting from static maps and manual updates to a dynamic, shared mapping system that supports planning, operations, digital tools, and printed materials.

For many years, festival maps were largely hand-crafted and updated repeatedly as event plans changed. Each group involved with the festival, event planners, university operations teams and media partners often worked with different versions of the map tailored to their specific needs. The EGIS team saw an opportunity to simplify and enrich this process by building a centralized geographic data framework that could feed multiple formats from a single source.

By organizing the information into layers of geographic data, including booth locations, stages, food vendors, restrooms, shuttle stops, and campus landmarks, the system allows updates to be made once and reflected wherever the maps appear. “Now every tent, stage, and all 200+ booths have a corresponding record in the data,” said Maree Archuleta, GIS Analyst with the University’s EGIS team. “If a booth number changes, we update it in the data table and the map updates automatically.”

For festival organizers managing hundreds of locations across campus, that shared foundation helps ensure everyone is working from the same accurate information. In the university’s Realtime Coordination Center (RTCC), staff field calls from volunteers and vendors across the grounds during the festival. When someone needs help at a specific booth, staff must quickly locate that spot on the map.

To support this, the EGIS team created an interactive operational map that allows staff to search booth numbers and instantly see their location on campus.

“Last year they wanted an interactive map where they could search for a booth number,” Archuleta said. “If a call came in and someone said they needed help at booth 175, staff could search that number and immediately see where it was on the map.”

What began as a proof of concept quickly proved valuable and became the starting point for this year’s expanded mapping system. Archuleta explained that the first step was converting the festival’s existing CAD drawings into GIS data. “We basically converted the CAD-drafted map into GIS as a proof of concept,” she said. “That became the starting point for everything we built this year.”

While festival attendees see a colorful, easy-to-read map, the system behind it organizes many types of information into flexible data layers. By turning layers on or off, the same source data can support different uses, including the festival website and mobile app. This approach also makes it easier to adapt as festival plans change. If a booth location moves or a service is added, the update can be made once and reflected across the printed map, website, and app.

“Because everything lives in our GIS database, the data can be published directly to other systems,” Archuleta said. “The festival’s native apps are able to pull that information, so the booth locations and map features stay synchronized.”

The project also demonstrates the power of collaboration between the university and the Tucson community. The EGIS team worked closely with festival organizers, campus facilities teams, and contributors from one of the top sponsors, The Arizona Daily Star, to ensure the maps served both operational needs and the visitor experience.

Debbie Kornmiller, a longtime contributor to The Arizona Daily Star’s festival coverage, has been involved with the festival since its beginning years and helped coordinate the Star’s printed festival guide. Producing the printed map previously involved painstaking manual work. “We always started with last year’s hand-drawn map and moved things around,” Kornmiller explained. “It was an incredibly laborious process, and every year the map went through dozens of revisions.”

The new GIS-based approach changed that dramatically. Instead of recreating the map each year, the team can build from an accurate base map of the university campus and apply different layers depending on the audience. “Each group needs different information,” Kornmiller said. “The exhibitors need booth numbers and electrical requirements, while the printed map just needs to show the general layout. The GIS map allowed those details to be filtered so everyone could see what they needed.”

For festival organizers, many of whom are volunteers, the ability to update the map quickly made a significant difference. Changes that once required waiting for designers to redraw a map and circulate proofs can now be made directly within the GIS framework. That flexibility also allows last-minute updates to be handled quickly—sometimes within minutes rather than hours.

“We used to have what we called a ‘good-enough map’ early in the process,” Kornmiller said. “But with this system, we could keep refining the map much later and still produce the most accurate version possible.”

The same map data also supports the festival’s mobile native apps, allowing visitors to tap locations such as 25+ food vendors or 10+ stage venues to see details about what’s happening there.

For visitors, the technology behind the maps may go largely unnoticed. But it quietly shapes their experience, helping them find an author talk, locate a favorite food vendor, or navigate across the busy campus. For Kornmiller, that seamless experience reflects the strength of the collaboration behind it. “The people who come to the festival will have no idea how much collaboration went into it,” she said. “But because of that work, they’ll have a better experience.”

Ultimately, the project reflects the spirit of the Tucson Festival of Books itself, bringing together university expertise, community partners, and volunteers to create something meaningful for the public. For the UITS EGIS team, it’s also a powerful example of how geographic information systems can help simplify complex challenges, turning a massive campus event into something that feels easy to explore.

For tens of thousands of festival attendees each year, that experience starts with a map.