I'm Erin Mutch, Director of the GIS Center and Geospatial Services at the UC Merced Library, a campus-wide program I founded in 2013. With nearly 30 years of geospatial experience spanning environmental consulting, municipal GIS, and academic instruction, I hold an MGIS from Penn State and teach software-agnostic geospatial methods, which includes open tools like QGIS and GDAL. My open-data work includes Cliopatria, a worldwide historical states dataset published in Nature Scientific Data (2025), and an in-progress ground-truthed Sundown Towns dataset built on an open three-repository architecture. I'm passionate about lowering barriers to geospatial tools and data in higher education.