New Feature: Map Search and Display

“Where are the items from your search results located?” and “How many of them are near you?” — just a cou­ple of the ques­tions we can now answer thanks to one of the lat­est enhance­ments to the Euro­peana por­tal. The devel­op­ment depart­ment at Euro­peana have been work­ing hard on a new inter­ac­tive search and dis­play fea­ture that enables you to locate and pre­view search results on a map.

The map is auto­mat­i­cally pop­u­lated with the first 1,000 results from a search query and dis­trib­utes them on a multi-layered map (Open­StreetMap, Google Phys­i­cal, Google Street, Google Hybrid, and Google Satel­lite). Items are rep­re­sented by pur­ple cir­cles, the higher the amount of results per area, the big­ger the cir­cle. Clus­ters of cir­cles are dis­trib­uted furher and more accu­ratly as users zoom in on areas and regions of inter­est. When you click on a cir­cle, an over­lay opens with a list of all the records for that spe­cific loca­tion, dis­play­ing titles and geo­graphic coor­di­nates for each item. You can browse the results with­out leav­ing the over­lay and access records with a full page dis­play by click­ing the title. The map is touch and swipe sen­si­tive so it is pos­si­ble to inter­act  with the new map from devices such as the iPad and Android tablets.

Indi­vid­ual items are posi­tioned based on their loca­tion coor­di­nates. At this stage not all objects have geo coor­di­nates, but we are con­stantly adding new items and work­ing with our con­tent providers to fur­ther enrich exist­ing records. You can access the map by click­ing the globe icon  at the top left-hand cor­ner after search­ing, or alter­na­tively open it directly under ”Explore” in the top menu. To get started explor­ing this new fea­ture, you can use the sug­gested search terms below (if you expe­ri­ence any issues when search­ing, you may need to clear your browser cache in order for the updates to take effect):

We are very excited to bring Euro­peana items closer to our users and we would love to hear what you think of the new map search and dis­play. This is the first of a num­ber of fea­tures we will be shar­ing with you in the com­ing week, so stay tuned to the Euro­peana blog for upcom­ing fea­ture releases.