Geospatial Librarian

The GeoBlacklight plugin for Omeka includes a custom feature in the Spatial Coverage field. A user can type in a place term, which will query GeoNames, and produce a dropdown list of options.  The user selects a value from the list, and this will pull in the GeoNames URI. The user can select multiple place names using multiple inputs.   A second feature of the plugin is that it can pull the bounding box coordinates from the GeoNames official record.  This is triggered during export to the GeoBlacklight schema JSON file if the Bounding Box element for the item is empty.  Although users can add multiple place names, only the first input will be queried for this function. When you begin typing in this input, it will query the GeoNames API and pull suggestions for defined place names.    NOTE:  This feature is constrained by the fact that our site is hosted on an https site, but the GeoNames API query is on http.  This means that your brows...

This post was co-written with Mara Blake. Three members from the Big Ten Academic Alliance Geospatial Data Project attended Geo4LibCamp 2017 . The organizers describe this annual event as “a hands-on meeting to bring together those building repository services for geospatial data. The main focus is to share best-practices, solve common problems, and address technical issues with integrating geospatial data into a repository and associated services.” The Setting Geo4LibCamp is hosted by Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Stanford is a fitting location for this event, because it has been a leader in the development of geospatial repositories, or georepositories , for libraries, notably with their work with the University of Santa Barbara to develop the National Geospatial Digital Archive , as well as their more recent contributions to discovery platforms for archived GIS data, particularly GeoBlacklight . It is also home to the interactive Rumsey Map Center , which i...

Technology: The GeoBlacklight plugin for Omeka includes a very handy feature in the Spatial Coverage field. A user can type in a place term, which will query GeoNames, and produce a dropdown list of options.  The user selects a value from the list, and this will pull in the GeoNames URI as well as the bounding box coordinates. Issue: The dropdown list will only display the first 12 items returned for any given term.  Occasionally, this list will not include the desired value.  Searching for several different U.S. states will trigger this problem.  The screenshots below show a search for Florida. Typing in “Florida” will not return the GeoNames URI for the state in the selectable list. Typing in “State of Florida” does return the desired value at the top of the list. A Discovery: All of the states in the U.S. have two possible formatting options that may (or may not) show up in the dropdown list in Omeka. On...