The following was excerpted from SWDC's previous website (circa 2002).

The Southwestern Colorado Data Center, Inc., was formed in the fall of 1994 primarily through the combined efforts of Frank Hodsoll, Ron Bell and Bill Ferguson. The Data Center was formed as a 501 (c)(3) non-profit corporation. The initial funding came from a broad cross section of Ouray County, Colorado. Contributions were received from the Ouray County government, the City of Ouray, the Town of Ridgway, the Ouray County Cattlemen's Association, the two school districts in the county, the three fire departments, the development community, the mining community, the construction community, several environmental groups and land trusts, local area ranches and citizens from the county at large.

The initial and primary goal was to create a policy neutral institution to oversee assembling information on Ouray County, Colorado for the purpose of making informed land use and economic development decisions by local policy makers. The secondary goal was to create an entity which might provide information to all citizens of the area and expand it's efforts to other regions of the Southwest.

Once the primary goal of producing the Ouray County Survey and Demographic and Economic Trend-Line Report was completed the Data Center embraced the mission of it's secondary goal - that of a regional resource for facilitating access to public information. In 1998 the name was changed to Southwest Data Center in order to accommodate this broader mission.

NTIA Grant
Concurrent to the Southwest Data Center's transition into regional a entity was the exploding pheromone of the Internet. The arrival of the Internet browser provided a standardized and popular means for computer based information to be publicly distributed. SWDC seized the opportunity to become a player in the education, training and development of tools that link people to information. SWDC was one of four "Regional and Local Partners" included in the National Telecommunications and Infrastructure Administration (NTIA), National Information Infrastructure (NII) grant titled "GIS and the NII: A Tool for Rural Growth Management". The purpose of which was to 1.) Identify, Acquire, Integrate Data Relevant To Decision-Making In Test-Bed Localities using a GIS Framework and the Statewide Internet Infrastructure, 2.) Deploy Tools For Transforming Data into Useful Information, and 3.) Distribute GIS Data and Analytic Tools Through the Colorado's Developing Rural Information Infrastructure to Ensure Broad Accessibility.

Present
Today Southwest Data Center provides a U.S. Geological Survey, Federal Geographic Data Committee Isite node. This resource is a clearinghouse for metadata, information about GIS coverages,on the National Spatial Data Infrastructure.

In addition to the USGS work, the Data Center has developed a world wide web presence for the Colorado Plateau Data Sharing Committee and is completing a website for the Colorado Ecosystem Partnership