2017 MLA Annual Conference

This session explores two enhancements to the Minnesota Reflections digital library. Greta Bahnemann, metadata coordinator for the Minnesota Digital Library, will first discuss the recently completed Geospatial Metadata Enhancement project. This project came about as a result of her participation in the Mountain West Geospatial Task Force, a collaboration between numerous digital collections. Greta will discuss her participation in this group and the work they did to identify existing geospatial metadata practices and establish new best practices for geospatial metadata creation. She will then outline how these new standards were implemented within the Minnesota Reflections metadata. Finally, she will discuss how this work optimizes the geographically-based discovery of resources in Minnesota Reflections. Jason Roy will next provide an overview of the new discovery layer that was designed and built for Minnesota Reflections, including the new geo-viewer that takes advantage of the work of the enhancement project. The outcome of this work has been the creation of a much more robust user discovery interface and a much more effective and rich browsing and searching experience in Minnesota Reflections. The ability to engage with visual collections using place-based geographic mappings will be demonstrated, including views by keyword, format, and proximity.