Digital Library Center Blog | UF

The University of Virginia Libraries has announced the launch of “Spatial Humanities,” a community-driven resource for place-based digital scholarship:

http://spatial.scholarslab.org/

The site was developed in response to needs identified by faculty and the site includes:

• an evolving, crowdsourced catalog of research resources, projects, and organizations
• a set of framing essays on the spatial turn across the disciplines by Dr. Jo Guldi of the Harvard Society of Fellows
• GIS-related feeds from Q&A sites and other forms of social media
• a peer-reviewed, occasional publication for step-by-step tutorials in spatial tools and methods

UVa is inviting everyone to participate:

• use Zotero to freely upload research citations, projects, and links to groups
• contribute your own tutorials and helpsheets in “Step By Step” format for peer review and formal publication
• adopt the #geoinst hashtag on Twitter and Delicious
• ask related questions and offer help on DH Answers or the GIS Stack Exchange
• post commentary on the essays

This looks like another great resource for all scholars.

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!

The UF Digital Collections (UFDC) have grown so dramatically that we critically need more resources to both promote and explain the many materials and their use. As of November 1, UFDC includes over 2.79 million pages. This means we’ve added 1.79 million pages in 13 months. Our existing training materials, tutorials, and help pages haven’t been able to keep up with the variety and quantity of materials, nor with documenting and explaining the other technical improvements we’ve implemented.

We’re working on making online tutorials that will explain the basics of using UFDC and that will highlight a few of the largest collections. While we’re actively working on these, we have far too many materials to cover in the near future so I’m also on the lookout for any existing training or contextual materials from other digital collections that could support UFDC. I found a great online tutorial on the Sanborn Maps from the Colorado Library Consortium.

UFDC includes the Sanborn Fire Insurances Maps of Florida Digital Collection and, while the Colorado Library Consortium’s tutorial is clearly focused on Colorado’s maps, the background it provides on what the Sanborn maps are and why people would use them applies equally well for any Sanborn Map Digital Collection.While this first screencast from the Colorado Library Consortium is wonderful for the history of the Sanborn Maps, we still  need to develop our own tutorial for how to use our Sanborn Map Digital Collection. While we have a great deal of work ahead of us developing this and other tutorials, it’s still wonderful to be able to find wonderful resources already available.

Check out UFDC’s Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of Florida for Florida’s Sanborn Maps and the Accidental Map Librarian Workshops, a wiki with many resources that explain the fascinating history of the Sanborn maps for all of the many Sanborn Map Digital Collections. Hopefully as we develop resources for UFDC, we’ll also be able to share resources as wonderful as those from the Accidental Map Librarian Workshops that will benefit digital collections!

The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) now include a “Map It” feature! With the “Map It” option, all items with geographic information are now displayed on a map using the Google Maps API. For instance, users can now see this photo of Gainesville mapped by clicking on the “Map It” tab, which shows a Google Map view of the photo’s location with a placemark.

See the Citadelle Henri Christophe in Haiti, and then see the satellite imagery map for it, which still clearly shows the structure, along with the surrounding area!

In case the maps aren’t exciting enough, UFDC also allows displays Flash files now so that items like this Beaded Coronet can be seen quickly with all of its thumbnails, in zoomable high definition, and in motion!

These improvements build from UFDC’s strong infrastructure with defined metadata for each item, to make research more fun, playful, and easier to understand. Instead of having to puzzle through the structured citation information for location, users can see the item along with the location. Only a small portion of the information already available in UFDC is really being utilized so far, so there’s much work to be done and many benefits to be gained!

Check out the maps, the objects in motion, and keep a lookout for much more to come!

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.

The Florida Humanities Council has funded a project by the University of West Florida (and involving the University of South Florida and the University of Florida according to the The Gainesville Sun article) to create podcasts about historic Florida. The project will create these “Pastcasts” (I love the name!) for historic Florida towns and the programs will be available for download from the Florida Humanities Council website.

I’m excited to hear all of the programs, but most excited to hear the Pastcasts for Alachua County, and to hear the rest with an eye on ways to connect them to the photos, maps, and other materials related to historic Florida already in the University of Florida Digital Collections. Then, I get to work on mapping them within a spatial, audiovisual, textual format, but I have to wait until I can steal some free time since I have a few other mappings to make first. It’s very exciting to have these Pastcasts and to have a venue for more of them and for enriching them and using them to enrich other materials.