Last November, I was excited to read a D-Lib article on leveraging Google Map APIs to generate latitude/longitude values from locations, then generating files which could be uploaded to create embeddable maps of content. I explored and mapped out the processes necessary for us to do something similar, and analyzed the existing subject headings in our online holdings to determine whether we had sufficient information captured in geographical subject tags.

My analysis revealed that we had two collections that had a wide dispersal of locations encoded in them:
• The Woodward Family Photo collection which has 642 items tagged with 92 distinct geographical subjects; and
• The Roland McMillan Harper Photo Collection which has 8548 items tagged with 936 distinct geographical subjects.

I have since extracted the subject headings from the latter collection and translated them into latitude/longitude pairs, creating a KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file for the latter collection, and we’re debating how useful this would be for researchers.

What do you think? I have two versions online for review. One has red pointer icons and the other has a unique icon for each item created from the images themselves. (Beware, this last one takes time to load!)

If you do NOT have Google Earth installed, the display SHOULD default to Google Maps for display.

Do you find either display useful? What do you like or dislike about this method of browsing content online? Please let us know!!!