Issue contents
Mapping Scotland's information landscape
A previous article published in WIDWISAWN earlier this year, "If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow, why oh why can't I?": Introduction and metaview of issues in Web2.0 and cataloguing, briefly described a project being undertaken for the Scottish Library and Information Council as an example of a "collective mash-up". The service developed by that project, Scotland's Information, has now been launched and is freely available on the Web. The service allows users to display the locations of Scotland’s library, archive and museum collections on Google Maps.
All service facilities can be used through mouse-clicks; no keyboard is necessary.
The service uses metadata from the Scottish Collections Network (SCONE) database. More information about the kinds of collections recorded is available from the About section of the SCONE service. The same set of metadata is also used by the Co-operative Information Retrieval Network for Scotland (CAIRNS), Research Collections Online (RCO), Scottish Distributed Digital Library (SDDL), and Scottish Library and Information Resources (SLIR).
Users choose which collections to locate in Scotland's Information through a variety of clickable interfaces:
Screenshot of the homepage of Scotland's Information.
A Scottish unitary authority is the highest geographic level that can be specified. At the even higher level of Scotland as a whole, the number of locations marked on a Google Map is too great to be useful, and can take more than a few seconds to display. (A screen-shot of all Scottish libraries is given in the earlier WIDWISAWN article.)
The clickable static map is one of the ways a user can display the precise locations of archives, libraries or museums by specifying a more general geographical area. The static map is based on the broadest area, the unitary authority (region).
A user can choose to include all three information domains (archives, libraries, museums) in the display, or restrict it to a single domain. There is also an option to limit the scope to the public library sector.
Partial screenshot of a clickable map for displaying the locations of all public libraries in a specified unitary authority (region).
The user specifies the region by clicking anywhere in the corresponding area on the map, or selecting it from an alphabetical list of region names.
The user can also switch to other views available at the regional level. As well as the static map with different domain scopes, there is a two-level tag cloud of regions and towns.
Partial screenshot of a tag cloud of Scottish regions.
Clicking on a region name tag leads to the more specific level of town (and village and city), again displayed as a tag cloud.
Partial screenshot of a tag cloud of towns in Fife (region).
A tag cloud is a way of displaying metadata used as access points in an information retrieval system. The tags are distinct words or phrases. The number of resources associated with each tag is indicated by a parameter of its visual display in the cloud. The most frequently used parameter is font size: the larger the size, the more resources will be retrieved by the tag. The concept comes from social networking environments and systems, where the tags are often entered by users.
The tag clouds used by Scotland's Information contain tags taken from controlled vocabularies assigned by information professionals. The vocabularies include:
Scotland's Information tag clouds include:
The tags can be phrases as well as single words.
The tags can be sorted alphabetically as well as in "cloud" order, where tags with the largest number of associated collections are placed in the centre with those of decreasingly fewer collections distributed evenly around them.
The tag clouds use colour as well as font size to indicate the "weight", or relative number of of associated collections, of each tag: red indicates more, blue indicates fewer.
Another refinement in Scotland's Information tag clouds is that they can be multi-level: clicking on a tag can lead to another cloud of tags which have some kind of narrower scope. As already mentioned, the region and town names form a two-level cloud. The DDC caption tags form a three-level cloud.
Partial screenshot of tag cloud of top-level (1) DDC captions.
Partial screenshot of tag cloud of level 2 DDC captions for Arts & recreation.
Partial screenshot of tag cloud of low-level (3) DDC captions for Sports, games & entertainment.
Users can display the controlled vocabularies for subjects as alphabetical lists as well as tag clouds. Lists include:
Partial screenshot of alphabetic list of persons who are the subjects of collections.
Users can display a list of custom sets of collections, or collection landscapes, of general interest. Scotland's Information landscapes include:
Mapping Scotland's information landscape
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Last updated: Nov 2008
