Help

What’s on the site

The digital images in Mappify come from the Lee Library’s digital collections. Currently included are selected photograph and map collections. We plan to include certain manuscript materials such as trail diaries and travel journals, as well as zoological samples

What’s not on the site

Not all content from our digital collections is available through Mappify, either because a collection has not been added or the location of individual items is not known. These images can be found by searching or browsing the full digital collection.

Hints and tricks

• Items can be filtered by any combination of selecting collections, keyword searching, and date filtering.
• Mousing over the results list pops up thumbnail images.
• Individual photographs are represented by red push pins. Blue dots indicate clusters of photographs; click on a cluster to see a list, or zoom in on a cluster to break it into smaller clusters or individual photos.
• When viewing maps, use the opacity slider to see the area overlaid by the map.
• When viewing a map, use the blue arrows around the map to navigate to adjacent maps.
• Three Google Maps views are available: Map, Sattelite, and Terrain. Satellite view allows for more zooming.

Technical details

Mappify was developed at Brigham Young University’s Lee Library, with generous funding from Angel Partners.

The application was created using the following tools:

• PHP and JavaScript for programming the interface
• Google Earth and Google Maps for finding coordinates for photographs and diary pages
• ArcGIS software for geo-referencing maps and creating KML and TFW files
• PKP Open Archive Harvester for harvesting data from CONTENTdm
• MySQL database for storing and searching data

We hope to be able to release our code as open source at some point, but as of now we have no timeline for that release.