January 1, 2001
CONTACT: jason carr
webmaster, www.mousetrap.net
972.321.2942
webmaster@mousetrap.net
Team Mousetrap tapped for Cartographic Connections project
Team Mousetrap's webmaster, Jason Carr, has passion in his voice when he talks about his latest project. He was selected to design, code and deploy the web delivery system for Cartographic Connections, a University of Texas at Arlington project funded by the Houston Endowment. He was selected for the project after he was noticed while working on his Ph.D. in Transatlantic History at UTA.
"This project speaks to the true power of the web", Carr said, "pushing out rare and important documents out to scholars, laymen, students around the world quickly, easily and for no cost to them. Online access may mean the original documents can be physically handled less often, increasing their lifespan so that later generations may have access to them. It's win-win for everybody concerned."
The project, a three-year, interactive electronic pilot project, connects secondary school students and teachers to a primary source -- historic maps of Texas, the Southwest and beyond, dating from the 1500s through the 1900s. About 75 historic maps are currently online, and Team Mousetrap designed the site to allow the addition of new map images by non-technical staff. The map images can be zoomed and panned to get stunning views of the documents (example).
The target audience, secondary schools in Texas, is a group with widely-varying resources. This means the site could not rely on high-bandwidth solutions, and there are no frames, java, javascript, etc., required to use the site (a java image viewer is optional). All the image handling is done through browser-non-specific CGI. The look and feel of the site is adapted from a famous Ortelius map from 1570, America Sive Novi Orbis.
"It's a rather complicated setup," Carr said, "the database and website functions are on an IIS machine to facilitate easy maintenance by non-technical staff. The guts of the on-the-fly image hacking are handled on a Solaris box." Carr adds that the original map scans were up to 1.5 Gigabytes in size. "These images were run through a GeoSpatial encoder to get them into a web-friendly format," he said, "although in this encoded format they were only down to about 40 Megabytes in size. As you load each page, the Solaris box serves up a nice web-friendly snapshot at about 50Kilobytes, which is easily handled. It's neat technology which can also be useful to the business world."
The University flew Carr to San Francisco to meet with David Rumsey, a prominent collector who is a making his collection available online, and Carr shared ideas with programmers at the Library of Congress who had previously tackled a project with maps held by that institution.
A side benefit of the project was his exposure to the historical documents "The exposure was great for my own academic research. Even graduate researchers usually don't get this kind of access to the historic maps."