Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Not only does the new interface for the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection support searching using the Google Map interface (complete with drag and drop pins for search refinement), it also supports searching by address. If that weren’t enough, Mark Sullivan (UF Digital Collections and Digital Library Center Programmer) now has the location circled on the images.

Drawing something on the images may seem easy, but it isn’t. Drawing on a normal image is easy – image size, where to draw, calculate, etc.  The images in the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection are being delivered by a JPEG2000 server. The server allows people to select the size of the image, the zoom level, and the area to focus on. Drawing on these images thus requires interaction with the JPEG2000 server to know the size and location on the image in all permutations. This is impressive alone, and made all the more impressive by having it along with so many other improvements, all of which work seamlessly together.

Other improvements include enhancements to the left-side navigation bar. It now includes a list of the specific resulting tiles by area, a thumbnail image of the complete tile for use in re-positioning on the tile, and a small Google Map for use in positioning in context.

Try out the new interface for the Florida Aerial Photography Digital Collection using the map search here!

The UF Digital Collections now has a new map interface. It’s only out in beta right now, but it’s already awesome. The new map interface is explained here and active in beta here.

The new interface allows users to:

• Search by address
• Search by selecting a point on a map
• Search by selecting an area on a map

The new interface is for the Florida historical aerial photographs, which people often use to find information on land use for a small area. The aerials are taken in flight lines, and so they cover large areas. To make them usable in the ideal manner, people need to be able to search by the address and then see the results that are closest to that address both overall (the flight level, with some matches) and the tile/individual photograph level for the exact matches.

Luckily for everyone involved with the Florida aerials, the UF Digital Collections, and for all of the users of all of the collections, Mark Sullivan both implemented the searching by collection and new functionality for using the results at the flight and tile levels.

For instance, see the results lists with all of the items and their locations like this. By clicking on one of those flights, then the matching individual tiles within the flight are shown on the left side like this.

As incredibly exciting as this is, what’s really exciting – to me – is how this continues the overall smart design of all of UFDC by making sure that all work serves existing and future needs. For future needs, this will eventually be incorporated into the online metadata editing. Then, people will able to draw an area or add a point to a Google map and have that automatically add the latitude and longitude to the metadata. Once the information is there, then everyone will be able to view and find those items using the map interface.

It can’t show all of the value from smart design and optimally leveraging new technologies. Of course, that doesn’t really matter because the new map interface is incredible even when viewed in isolation, so try it out!

Last week, UC Santa Barbara announced that they received a massive collection of aerial photography, valued at $14.3 Million, from Pacific Western Aerial Surveys of Santa Barbara. The collection includes more than 500,000 aerial images of 65 major metropolitan areas in the United States at the turn of the 21st Century (1999-2002). This is really amazing, especially so because UCSB Map & Imagery Library is home to the Alexandria Digital Library (ADL), so these materials will be preserved and accessible in the future.