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GIS and Geospatial Technologies: Home

This guide provides GIS tutorials, data, books, course-specific GIS guides and other geospatial related information that might be of interest.

Overview

As of January 2023, UCLA has a campus-wide license for Esri's ArcGIS software. New UCLA affiliates can access ESRI Resources using their UCLA Logon ID credentials. If you received an Individual ArcGIS Login BEFORE January 2023 that is linked to the UCLA GIS instance, that login still works, and you should continue to use it until accounts are consolidated. If you are a UCLA Extension student, contact your professor for access.

Our ESRI software license does not permit members of the public or past or future UCLA community members to use the software and associated data. 

Our policy

UCLA affiliates have access to the UCLA ArcGIS Online organization as long as they have an active UCLA Logon ID. Esri does not control when the university will de-activate UCLA IDs for graduating students or departing staff and faculty. Once your UCLA account becomes inactive, you will:

  • no longer have edit access to any of your content (data, web maps and web apps) in the UCLA ArcGIS Online organization;
  • no longer be authorized to use ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Desktop and other Esri desktop software; 
  • no longer have access to Esri Academy's "maintenance required" training materials. 

We do not delete items from the UCLA ArcGIS Online organization; after your account is de-activated, your content (data, web maps and web apps) will remain indefinitely online. The visibility of your content will depend on the share settings that you set -- for example, if you set your content to be shared to the organization, other organization members will be able to access and create copies of your content. If your content is openly shared, it will be publicly visible, and anyone with an ArcGIS Online account will be able to make copies of it. Once your UCLA ID is inactive, you will NOT be able to modify the share settings, edit, delete or transfer ownership of your content, so plan accordingly. 

Transfer to another UCLA acount

Transfer to other people's accounts

If you are working on ongoing projects or collaborations with other UCLA students, faculty, and/or staff, one option is to 'hand off' and transfer ownership of your content to their account. This allows another UCLA affiliate to own and maintain the content. 

 To do this, identify the person who will be receiving your content. Make sure they:

Use ESRI Migration Assistant to transfer the account to another. You can refer to this video for more details. 

Transfer between your own two accounts

If you have an ArcGIS Online account before January 2023, you are likely to have two accounts.

  • One is the old account ending with ‘_gisucla’ and
  • the other is a new account, UCLA SSO account.

The account ending with ‘_gisucla’ is manually created by administrators, while your UCLA SSO account comes along with your UCLA ID.
For those who have two accounts, you may have content created under both accounts. Unfortunately, though both of the accounts are yours, these two accounts do not communicate. If you want to check the content under different accounts, you have to log in each account. The content under the old account will stay intact. However, it is highly recommended that you use the UCLA SSO account in the future.  Should you want to migrate the content from your ‘_gisucla’ account to your UCLA SSO account here is a link to the ESRI Migration Assistant.

If you do not have an ArcGIS Online account before Jan. 2023, you are likely to have only one account. The account is associated with your UCLA ID. You can log in ArcGIS Online via UCLA SSO. All the created content will be under this account.  

Transfer to a Non-UCLA account

Create a Non-UCLA ArcGIS Online Account

If you wish to retain access to your content, transfer your content to an ArcGIS Online account outside the UCLA ArcGIS Online organization. You can either:

Set up a free public ArcGIS Online account These accounts are for personal, non-commercial use and can be used to create, store, manage and share a limited amount of ArcGIS Online content.
Purchase an individual ArcGIS Online subscription A subscription includes access to ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Desktop, an ArcGIS Online Creator user account, 100 credits for data storage, premium data access and geoprocessing, and access to the Esri Academy. These are meant for personal, non-commercial use. 
Transfer content to an ArcGIS Online account associated with another organization If you are moving to a new school or job, see if your new institution has an ArcGIS Online organization, and request an account. 

Copy Content with the ArcGIS Online Assistant

After setting up a non-UCLA ArcGIS Online account, you can use the ArcGIS Online Assistant tool to copy certain content to your new account. If you are leaving UCLA and want to transfer your content to a personal account or another ArcGIS Online organization, ArcGIS Online Assistant can help you.
However, it's important to note that:

  • Not all types of content can be copied over using this tool.
  • ArcGIS Online Assistant copies content to another account. If you want to remove content or limit access to content from your UCLA account, you will need to log back into your UCLA account to delete or change the share settings on your content after you copy the files over to a new account. 
  • ArcGIS Online Assistant is a free and unsupported tool. This means Esri Support Services do not directly support it. 

Check out The ArcGIS Assistant User Guide to get started transferring content:

Using the ArcGIS API for Python

The ArcGIS API for Python can be used to manage your content in ArcGIS Online. The clone_items method can be used to copy items to another user in the same organization, or to another account outside of UCLA's ArcGIS Online organization. Unlike the ArcGIS Online Assistant, this workflow will allow you to copy web applications like StoryMaps and Dashboards, provided you have a basic understanding of python. 
Peter Knoop from the University of Michigan has detailed the process of cloning a StoryMap in this blog post. His ArcGIS Notebook containing this script can be downloaded here.

Note: The above instructions refer to instructions provided by Johns Hopkins University Libraries.