PhillyHistory.org, the Philadelphia Department of Records’ historic photo and map website powered by our Sajara product, now features two new groups of images from the collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

The Historical Images of Philadelphia collection includes over 170 photos taken throughout the city during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With images of everything from Memorial Hall to the hand and torch of the Statue of Liberty, the Centennial Exhibition collection contains 1,600 beautiful photographs documenting America’s celebration of 100 years of history and progress.

Since the geographic search option on PhillyHistory.org is such a popular feature, we wanted to geocode the Free Library images as well. This proved to not be so straightforward for the Centennial images. The exhibition was located in Fairmount Park, an area that has changed dramatically since 1876. To find the coordinates of the original locations of the Centennial buildings, we needed to georeference an historic map of the Centennial grounds. By overlaying the historic map with a current street map in ESRI’s ArcGIS and finding a few buildings and intersections that still existed to serve as anchor points, we were able to create a new image that showed the locations of the historic buildings. We then found the coordinates for specific buildings and used them to geocode photos of those buildings, making the images searchable by location.

Including collections from multiple organizations in the system is something that we’ve always hoped to be able to do. When PhillyHistory.org first debuted, it contained a few thousand images from the collection of the Philadelphia City Archives. Over the next couple years, the Philadelphia Water Department contributed 1,500 historic images, the Department of Records provided 4,800 property maps, and the Free Library added nearly 200 historic maps dating from the 1850s and 1860s. The addition of the Free Library images provides PhillyHistory.org users with even greater access to the historical resources of the city.

Of course, including the collections of various organizations in a single database is not as easy as signing an agreement and uploading some images. Institutions have different needs ranging from collection size to collection management processes to available metadata. We built Sajara, our geographic digital collection management system, to accommodate these different needs by a series of features that enable watermarks, metadata and activation of features (like commenting, photo print sales, licensing, etc.) to be configured on a collection-by-collection basis.  Web-access prevents the necessity of installing software at different offices, and a system of roles and levels of access ensures that while multiple organizations may have their data in the same database, they have the ability to manage only their own collections.

The result is a database that enables several organizations to pool their resources and increase public access to their collections. Rather than switching from website to website, users can visit PhillyHistory.org to view amazing images and maps from three separate organizations. And we are now working with additional institutions to add their images in the future.

“Pretty excited” turned out to be an understatement. People loved that they could use Sajara’s geographic search feature to locate historic photos of their neighborhoods. We began receiving wonderful comments and stories from PhillyHistory.org users.

We loved hearing the stories but unfortunately did not have an easy way for users to share their comments with the larger PhillyHistory community. We decided to remedy the problem by adding a new feature to Sajara – a public commenting panel.

New Sajara commenting panel in use on PhillyHistory.org

Enabled on a collection basis, commenting provides a way for the public to share information or opinions about an image with other users via a comment page on the detail view for each photo.  After creating an account with PhillyHistory.org, users can leave comments about the image, respond to comments left by other users, or report abusive comments.  A user’s comment is associated with their user name, and each user name is linked to a public profile for that user.  While a user’s comments are shown by default on their user page, the user can also choose to display their favorite photos, bookmarked searches, and personal information such as a biography or website.  In addition, a user can also sign up to receive other users’ future comments via an RSS feed.

Actually implementing the commenting system turned out to be somewhat complicated.  There are a few different ways to organize comments, including a flat list that shows comments in the order they were entered and a nested tree that shows all the relationships between comments and responses to comments.  Getting it right means understanding your audience.  Our approach with the Sajara software organizes comments into single-tier threads so that users can see simple conversations but not get lost sorting through which ones relate to others.

Sajara commenting feature in the Japanese Gardens of the World sample application of the Sajara software

Commenting systems require quite a lot of ongoing management as well.  Some comments will need reviewing for various reasons, which, on a high volume site, can be an overwhelming task.  Included in the Sajara commenting system are a set of tools that allow the site’s administrators to easily review and handle all the site’s comments.

The public commenting feature is currently available on PhillyHistory.org and Japanese Gardens of the World, the Sajara sample application, and is an optional feature for future Sajara implementations.

Big Map search window in the new version of Sajara

Oh! … and by the way, have you seen the new ‘Big Map’ search window we implemented in PhillyHistory.org (also a new option in Sajara)?  The map view search page features a nearly full screen map with thumbnails of the images displayed along the bottom of the screen.  Flags on the map correspond with each thumbnail, indicating where the photo was taken.  All the original search filters (address, keyword, topics, dates, and more) are still available at the top of the map under the ‘Search By’ menu.

Check both new features out and let us know what you think!

The new Sajara geographic search page is available in Japanese Gardens of the World, a sample application that demonstrates Sajara's capabilities.

In order to try out our idea for another geographic-based search page, we turned to Japanese Gardens of the World, our sample application powered by Sajara. To create the map, we utilized the same technology that drives our thumbnail search page, OpenLayers and ExtJS. These upgrades offered us increases in loading speed and better compatibility with new browser versions.

While the map-based search page focuses more on geographically displaying the results of a search, it still contains all the original search functionality. A drop-down ‘Search By’ menu contains fields allowing users to search by address, keyword, topics, collections, time period, and a variety of advanced search options. In order to help users keep track of their search criteria, we also implemented a new search feature called ‘Active Filters’, which provides a quick reminder of the selected criteria.

'Fisheye' thumbnail view of photographs in the current map view.

The results of a search are displayed as a row of thumbnails across the bottom of the map with flags on the thumbnails corresponding to flags on the map. The thumbnails expand as you mouse over them. We used some simple math and javascript to implement this fish-eye effect, allowing users to quickly view basic data about an asset without requiring them to load a new page. A larger, more detailed page with additional information and photographs of the garden is available by clicking on the thumbnail.

The map-based search provides users with another option for searching through and browsing assets in their digital collection, but the thumbnail search is also still available as a way to view search results. Using the ‘Search’ menu, users can select whether they would like to search the database using the map or thumbnail view.  They can also switch between the two pages thanks to the ‘Map/Thumbnail’ button in the upper right corner of the page.

Make sure you visit our Japanese Gardens of the World sample application and let us know what you think!

An increasingly hot topic in technology lately is that of mobile versions of web applications. It seems that everyone is carrying a BlackBerry, SmartPhone, or iPhone these days, and wants to be able to access all their information on the go. In response to this trend, we’ve recently decided to make an investment in learning about and implementing mobile phone technology for several of our software applications. I recently attended a workshop on iPhone development at the 2009 Museums and the Web conference, and decided that working on an iPhone-specific application would be a great way to get started. We decided to start with the Sajara-enabled PhillyHistory.org site.

Basically, developing for iPhone can take one of three forms:

• Adjust an existing site. Essentially, you simply need to make sure that your current site looks good on the iPhone.
• Create an iPhone specific web application. Create a new web application, but tailor it visually and functionally to the iPhone’s layout and interface.
• Create an iPhone application. Write a full application (in the Objective-C programming language) and publish it through the App Store.

Each option has its advantages and disadvantages, but we decided to go with the second option, since it allows us to have a very sleek interface, without the difficulty of rewriting the application in a new language and the overhead of publishing it to the Apple Store. The main disadvantage to creating a full iPhone application is that it means that we won’t have access to the iPhone’s location SDK.

Once we chose a development route, we needed to start thinking about the user interface from a functional standpoint. I first decided to remove some of the more advanced features (such as keyword and topic searching) of the PhillyHistory site, and focus on what Sajara does best: geography-based searching. iPhone UI design generally follows a simple ‘screen-per-function’ guideline, so I decided to include three ways of accessing a geographic search: by neighborhood, by text location, or directly by map interaction.

All three tasks eventually take the user to a map view, which includes the Sajara geographically-based asset search, and shows markers for the results. The map view uses the OpenLayers API for displaying the map and markers, with some hacks and modifications for allowing the user to more easily drag the map around and zoom in and out on the iPhone. Each time the user pans or zooms the map, the new map extents are used to request a new search. Since I was mostly focusing on the redesign of the user interface, I left the logic behind the search mechanism unchanged from the logic that runs the full PhillyHistory site.

From the map, a user can select one of the markers to get the details for that asset. This screen shows the asset’s image, title, date, and other related data.

Developing the Sajara iPhone web application was fairly simple from a technical perspective. The constraints of having a small screen and keeping a touch interface in mind did make the project interesting. Additionally, one of the big advantages of developing a web app for the iPhone is that there is only one target platform, which greatly simplifies testing.

We look forward to continuing to brainstorm about possible ‘next steps’ in expanding our collection of mobile Sajara apps (and beyond). The next steps for this application and research, specific to Sajara, might include:

• Enhancing the map interface to allow for pinch zooming
• Supporting other devices, e.g. BlackBerry
• Allow other types of searching (keyword, year range, etc.)

To experience the PhillyHistory iPhone app, please go to http://www.phillyhistory.org/i

The Philadelphia Mural Arts Program is the nation’s largest mural program. Since 1984, the Mural Arts Program has created nearly 3,000 murals and works of public art in Philadelphia, which are now part of Philadelphia’s civic landscape and a source of inspiration to the thousands of residents and visitors who encounter them, earning Philadelphia international recognition as the “City of Murals.” The Mural Arts Program also engages over 100 communities each year in the transformation of neighborhoods through the mural-making process, and their free art education programs annually serve over 3,000 youth at sites throughout the city and at-risk teens through education outreach programs.

Some of the thousands of murals in the city of Philadelphia.

While the Mural Arts Program has evolved from an anti-graffiti program into a city-wide public art organization, it has become increasingly important for it to manage the myriad of information about each of the murals and the communities they serve. The Mural Arts Program needed to track and publish information about a whole range of details, including artists, assistants, sponsors, affiliated organizations, start, completion and dedication dates, maintenance activities, renovation and demolition details and (of course) the location of each mural. Organizing this type of information is not a unique concern for Mural Arts. Hundreds of organizations throughout the U.S. are managing public art programs and face similar issues. Emails about various pieces of art go back and forth within the organization, some data is stored in Excel, other data in Filemaker, photos in other systems, some of it is on the organization’s web site while much of it is not. And in the end, staff members have a hard time carrying out the mission of their organization efficiently while also effectively showcasing the full extent of their collection to the public, funders, and potential sponsors.

Sajara-powered mural search page on Muralfarm.org.

When the Mural Arts Program approached Azavea, they had a good sense of what they were looking for. And, after building PhillyHistory.org for the Philadelphia Department of Records to assist them with the management and showcasing of 100,000′s of historic photos of the city, we thought that a geographic collection like that of the Mural Arts Program would be a good fit for Sajara, our geographic digital asset management solution…And so Muralfarm.org was born.

Muralfarm.org enables the public to search for murals by artist, theme, date, keywords and of course by location and neighborhood. Visitors to Muralfarm.org can tag favorite murals, save searches, be notified when new murals are added thanks to GeoRSS feeds, and enjoy special features like viewing the murals in Google Earth and Google Maps – StreetView. At the same time, the Mural Arts Program staff can easily manage information pertaining to each mural through Sajara’s digital asset management tools. And because the whole system is web-based, artists, neighborhood residents, community groups, and Mural Arts Program staff members can leave comments, send messages, and make corrections online, thereby improving the database over time. By pairing both public access search capabilites with collection management tools, Mural Arts is able to use the Sajara platform to store critical information about its projects in a single place.

The Mural Arts Program has essentially created a huge outdoor, geographically distributed museum with the entire city as its canvas. Muralfarm.org brings more than 1,000 murals under one roof, enables the public to see them all, and creates a foundation for the program to more effectively manage information about each work of art. It’s a living, changing feast for the eyes!

By the way, have you seen our newly launched Sajara website? We think it’s quite slick, how about you? Send us your comments.

Beyond the fairly simple task of re-ordering search options, we are also excited to launch a new function in Sajara that enables the upload, management, and search of a whole new class of documents: maps. In the new version of Sajara, searching for maps is as simple as searching for photographs and other documents. Simply use the search options or the map to limit your search to a place, subject or time, and use the new tabs to view either photographs or maps. While PhillyHistory.org currently holds 5,000 maps, our archivists will be adding more each week along with new photographs to enrich PhillyHistory.org’s view into the city’s past.

Most importantly, in order to enhance users’ experience on the site, especially with the map search functions, we decided to entirely re-design the search page using OpenLayers and Ext JS. OpenLayers is an open source JavaScript library that enables ‘slippy maps’ to be embedded in any web application. OpenLayers allows communication with most standards-compliant web map services such as ESRI’s ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server and GeoServer, as well as other sources such as GoogleMaps. As an open source framework, OpenLayers separates map tools from map data and enables developers to include layers from several different sources in the same map. Ext JS is a visual framework which offers customizable website pieces (or widgets) that can be easily added, updated, and changed to fit a website’s design.

Shifting PhillyHistory.org from a Microsoft ASP.NET – only framework to one powered by not only ASP.NET but OpenLayers and Ext JS as well, was not a completely smooth affair. Several of the bumps in the road came from learning how to use OpenLayers and Ext JS effectively. While both are written using JavaScript objects, each has its own methods to drive its functionality. Getting a handle on a new framework involves learning how different objects are connected, how they communicate and how to get them to perform at their best. But the result is stunning, smooth, and allows for easy-to-use functionalities. Let us know what you think!

Why did we add OpenLayers to Sajara? The short answer was that we wanted to be able to support multiple map servers in order to give our clients more flexibility, but by incorporating an open source toolkit like this, we are also leveraging the thousands of hours of time invested by a global community of developers. While it is evolving rapidly (meaning that we get new functionality ever few months), it is a well-tested and responsive set of components. It also has two sister projects called TileCache and FeatureServer that add some additional capabilities.

Our initial foray with OpenLayers has been very positive. We have used it in some of our pro bono projects as well as work for other clients, and we are now testing it for potential future use in DecisionTree and Kaleidocade. It is a good example of how open source software can support and extend commercial software in a positive way.

The partnership with Azavea will benefit PALINET members with preferred rates on Sajara®, our geographic digital asset management software operating the award-winning historical photograph archive, PhillyHistory.org, as well as many of our software customization and development services. For more information about our PALINET Business Partnership or Sajara, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Azavea will be presenting Sajara at several conferences in the next few months including:

NTEN Conference – Science Fair, New Orleans, LA, March 19, Booth # 32

Museums and the Web Expo 2008 in Montreal, Canada, April 8-12, Booth #28;

American Association of Museums Annual Meeting and Expo in Denver, CO, April 27-May 1, Booth #207.

Since their introduction in 2005, Google Maps and Google Earth have transformed the geospatial software world. Google Maps introduced a game-like, ‘slippy’ map interface that was simple and intuitive. Subsequent releases have added traffic, terrain, street-level photography, and a mapping toolkit that enable you to add maps to your web site. The Javascript-based Google Maps API lent itself to being combined with other web API’s and resulted in thousands of ‘mashups’ that displayed data on a Google Maps base map.

Google Earth, a technology Google acquired when it purchased Keyhole Corporation, is a software application that you download and install on your computer. It provides satellite and aerial imagery in a 3D environment. More important for folks like us, it supports KML (Keyhole Markup Language). KML enables us to add new data and display it in Google Earth.

We thought these Google tools were pretty neat, and we are always looking for ways to add cool new features to our projects and solutions. So in August, we added an RSS publication feature to our Sajara product, which runs the PhillyHistory web site. What’s RSS? It’s another web standard that is typically used by newspapers and blogs to provide syndication of articles. That sounds like publishing, so you might ask why we put RSS in a GIS product. Well, we had requests from PhillyHistory visitors to be able to save their searches and also be able to monitor when new photos were added to their area of the city. We thought that if every search could be turned into an RSS feed, then people would be able to use the RSS readers that are built into the Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers to monitor when the photos in their area of interest are changing. But we then went one step further and added the latitude and longitude coordinates of each photo with a GeoRSS tag. GeoRSS is simple but powerful. And it’s supported by Google Maps, so you can now take a PhillyHistory search and paste it into a Google Maps search box and see the historic photos in Google Maps.

In October, we added Google Earth support to Sajara as well. Assets stored in a Sajara database can now be displayed in Google Earth three different ways. First, every photo with a location now has a button that says ‘Show in Google Earth’. Second, the first 100 records of any search can be shown as a group. Finally, we just added a feature whereby an entire collection can be displayed in Google Earth. For the PhillyHistory project, with more than 48,000 photos — and counting — it’s a pretty dense set of imagery, but you can now fly through a 3D version of downtown Philadelphia, clicking on historic photos and displaying them in Google Earth.

Peter Brantley in his recent “Mapping Philly” article in O’Reilly Radar, calls this latest feature “fantastic” … well, we couldn’t agree more. What a stunning cyber trip in history indeed!

Have you got ideas about how we can integrate our work with other internet sites? Let us know and we’ll see what we can do!

PhillyHistory Mobile can serve pedestrians and visitors curious to see what their surroundings used to look like; organizers of historic tours; and teachers who are interested in making their history curricula more interactive. It has a simple search screen in which you can enter an address or intersection of nearby historic or cultural sites. The resulting display returns a map of the area showing coordinates for various historic and cultural assets in close proximity, accompanied by photos of those assets.

This innovative mobile website leverages Sajara, our web-based digital asset management software. It was built on ESRI’s ArcGIS server technology and ASP.NET 2.0 Mobile Controls. The greatest advantage of Sajara is that it can be adapted to virtually any historic, cultural or commercial asset. It can be applied to cultural resources of any kind (murals, architectural assets, and paintings), tours, real estate, the restaurant industry, and environmental information.

The mobile website has been tested for browsers on various devices using device emulators including the Pocket PC, Openwave, Sony Ericsson and many more. It’s designed to work on phones with Internet browsers that support wml, html or xhtml.

PhillyHistory Mobile is an extension of PhillyHistory.org, developed by Azavea in 2004 to help the City Archives preserve its deteriorating and aging photographic memories, PhillyHistory.org attracts thousands of unique visitors each month. Its e-commerce module supports funding of the project and creates revenue through the sale of prints and digital photos. New images from the City Archives’ estimated two million photos are uploaded and viewable from both PhillyHistory media at a rate of two thousand per month. And now you can take a mobile tour of Philadelphia’s past from a handheld computer or other mobile device, visit mobile.phillyhistory.org and enjoy your ride on what Philadelphia Magazine has called “your own flux-capacitor-fueled DeLorean”!

PhillyHistory.org did it again! People are going nuts over it. It even received at Best of Philly! 2007 Award for best local website.

On top of that, Azavea, the City of Philadelphia Department of Records, and The Art Institute of Philadelphia partnered to organize an exhibit of more than 80 photos from the site. From images of trade, commerce, education, municipal services, arts and entertainment to photos of men and women actually building the city, the exhibit reflects the vitality, vibrancy and development of Philadelphia over the past 150 years. Images dating from the late 1800s, some never before seen by the public, are on display. “Philadelphia Stories: The Building of a Great American City” is free and located at the Art Institute’s 1622 Chestnut Street gallery until August 31.

Local press and TV covered the event heavily, which attracted droves of people to the gallery. Visitors were mesmerized, amused and moved by photos as varied as that of the “Rat Patrol”, the site of City Hall without the iconic building on it, men building the sewer system in mud up to their eye brows, and a worker seated next to William Penn’s head before the statue was lifted on top of City Hall.

Commissioner Joan Decker

Rachel Cheetham-Richard and Governor Rendell

In her address, Commissioner Joan Decker said: “Voices and stories  of the Philadelphians who helped shape our city can be heard through these images. It is our hope that it will inspire more Philadelphians to explore this historical treasure-trove and offers glimpses of both the heroic, tragic and everyday facets of the city’s long and rich history.”

Governor Rendell stopped by the exhibit opening reception on August 2 and picked two photos of the construction of City Hall as his favorites. Between a few hand shakes and camera flashes, he even took the time to chat about the project with us!

PhillyHistory.org is powered by Sajara. Stay tuned for next issue’s news about a mobile version of the software!