The Map Window

The Map Window of Globetrotter is powered by Google, hence the little icon in the lower left corner. It provides a nice set of tools to help you visually find your locations of interest, and make sense of the search results provided by Globetrotter.

Framing Your Query

The area encompassed by the Map View produces the coordinates searched when you submit a query. To help you find and keep the area you are interested in, there is the Jump Box in the lower left of the map window.

The find address form will take your input, make a best guess where that is, and jump to a wide zoom centered on that location. Because it is such a wide zoom level you can get many results not actually in the location you look up.

If you want to restrict search results to a specific area, you can:

• Zoom in to contain only your area of interest.
• Add the name of your location to the Text Search.
• Sort your results by "spatial proximity" as discussed in the Query Form page.

Return to Last Searched View, when clicked, will recenter the map wherever it was when you last clicked Search. This feature is very imporant for research within carefully selected geographic coordinates, as many Globetrotter features will slightly shift the map view.

Working with Search Results

Here is the result example briefly touched on in the Result section:

When you get search results, it immediately marks them on the map with an orange, lettered marker:

Every marker sits in the center of a blue box which outlines the actual footprint of each object. The footprint is the geospatial area the result covers on the map. When you float your mouse pointer over a single result's box on the left side, this blue-outline box will fill in with more blue, to help you find where your result is on the map.

When you click on the result title or the Object Details toolbar link, an info bubble will pop up over the marker on the map. (Note: If the bubble goes off the screen, click somewhere else on the map and drag your view until the bubble is visible.) This bubble has two tabs, Overview and Download.

The Overview tab shows:

• A correctly scaled thumbnail image of the result.
• The object title, date of creation, and centerpoint in latitude/longitude.
• A link to the Browse Image (larger than a thumbnail, easier to view than the full download.)
• A link to the Catalog Record, with all the object metadata.

The Download Tab shows links to the downloadable components of the object, and is titled with a link to the full Access Report, which includes licensing information.

A Cluster of Results

Sometimes your search results will be overlapping, or simply small enough and close together enough that a high zoom level makes them inseparable. When that happens, go to the result toolbar for any result whose identifying letter you can read, and click Look Closer.

When you click Look Closer, it will create a popup bubble on the map with a zoomed in view of that result. Most of the time this is enough to differentiate a result from its neighbors.

See how Result K's footprint is backlit? That means the mouse pointer is floating over its result box in the Result Panel

Finally, the Toggle Result on Map option hides the result, removing it from the map so you can focus on more meaningful results. This darkens the result box on the left side.