Presenting a geographic discovery tool for books based on the shortlist template

[BenNoeske]

Hello all,

I would like to present a story map based on the shortlist template: http://gis.maine.edu/subjectmap/

This map displays books within my library's juvenile collection, based on the geographic subject headings assigned to those books in the library catalog. The idea is to provide an alternative way for children and teachers to find books about places of interest to them.

I modified the template to bypass the intermediate popup and go straight to the detail box. Because this makes it more difficult to determine where items are located if the user clicks on one of the tiles in the left hand pane, I modified it further so that mousing over one of the tiles causes the corresponding marker symbol to pop out.

I am a version or two behind on the official shortlist template. I hope to update my template soon to get it back in synch.

Any feedback welcome!

Ben Noeske

p.s. I ended up creating 999 blue and green marker symbol icons. Generally I think this many would cause way too much clutter. But if anybody really needs them I'd be happy to share. I can also create new sets with relatively little difficulty, if you would like a different color...

[RupertEssinger]

Hi Ben

This is awesome work!

I really like the customization to pop out the marker symbol on the hover event in the tab.

I'm replying here in addition to the email I sent you yesterday so that people on the forums can see some feedback from us. Thanks for sending us the sets of numbered marker symbols. As you noticed, the Shortlist wasn't designed to handle this many points in one tab and there's some enhancement we could do on our end during the initial load to make it clearer to the user that the map is loading. 

Like I mentioned in my email, in the current version of the Shortlist template download, we made an enhancement so that shortlists with only one tab of places no longer have a tab 'handle' control at the top of the tab at all, which gives one-tab shortlists a cleaner look. But it may not be worth downloading that new version again just to get that enhancement because you are actually using the tab handle control anyway to convey some info to the user.


Rupert