Lynn O’Leary, Todd Grappone, University of Southern California
The USC Digital Archive, presented at the 2004 PRDLA meeting, now contains 132,000 publicly available digital images and metadata displayed via a newly designed user interface. The focus remains on the presentation of local, area, state, US and Pacific Rim-related content, searchable across all collections or by individual collection. A recently completed prototype project tested whether efficient, appropriate spatial search tools could be easily integrated into the Digital Archive. The project has resulted in three new services–a clickable map, a gazetteer, and a geocoder—that provide new filters for guiding the identification and selection of content.
Coded in JAVA, ISP and JSF, the map application taps into the functionality of a commercial off-the-shelf internet mapping software, ESRI ArcIMS. A user can draw a box on the map and retrieve all of the geo-referenced records within the geographic boundaries of the box. The user can also view those records as points on the map. The gazetteer was initially built independently of this project, using newly-developed, fully automated data mining techniques to compile a demonstration data set from one city within Los Angeles (El Segundo). The gazetteer provides a highly detailed location filter which a patron can use to identify a specific location, such as a business, and retrieve all of the catalog content within a specified geographic buffer around that location. The geocoder, a very popular feature on many web applications, is written utilizing a standard geocoding web service and allows a user to enter any street address and zip code in the US to search for holdings within a designated radius of the user-specified address.
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