My Place – exploring SLV collections through a street address

‘What can I find out about my house?' My work as Creative Technologist-in-Residence at the SLV LAB was inspired by questions like this that librarians at the SLV hear every day. I wanted to explore how the Library’s place-based collections could be used to provide new entry points for discovery and navigation – entry points based not on words, but locations.

At the end of my residency, I pulled all the different collections I’d been working with into a single interface – 'My Place'. It’s not polished or complete, but I think it’s a useful starting point to think about the possibilities. You just type in an address, street name, or place name and My Place shows you maps, photos, newspapers, and even extracts from the Sands & MacDougall directories. Try it now!

Search results in My Place are bookmarkable. So save and share your discoveries!

The collections

My Place draws its data from a number of different place-based collections that I’ve been working on during my residency.

OpenStreetMap

When you enter an address in the search box, My Place looks it up in OpenStreetMap to get its geospatial coordinates. It then places a marker and re-centres the map at the top of the app.

OpenStreetMap is also used to retrieve additional information about the suburb, including its boundaries.

Sands & MacDougall’s directories

My Place queries the full-text searchable version of Sands & Mac for addresses. Results will vary based on the OCR quality and the nature of query, but it can give you a potted history of who has lived in your house. The search results are displayed in chronological order, and include an image snippet showing the actual printed entry as well as the text content and metadata.

Committee for Urban Action photographs

If you enter a full street address, my place will search the CUA collection for photos associated with the segment of road that includes the current address. It then displays the individual images from any matching photosets.

Otherwise my space will look for CUA photos that are near the current location, and display a randomly-selected image from each photoset.

Georeferenced maps

my place searches through digitised maps from the SLV collection that have been georeferenced by the public. It finds maps that either intersect with the currently selected location, or are nearby.

If you enter a full street address, the first 6 georeferenced maps will be positioned on a modern basemap with a marker indicating the currently selected point. This means you can see your address on a historical map. The number of georeferenced maps that can be displayed in this way is determined by the browser – so I’ve limited it to 6 to be safe.

Parish maps

my place searches through parish maps in the SLV collection that have geospatial coordinates or approximate bounding boxes. It finds maps that either intersect with the currently selected location, or are nearby.

Newspapers

my place searches through my dataset of newspapers in the SLV collection that have a place of publication documented in the ‘Place newspaper published’ metadata field. It finds newspapers that are either associated with the current suburb/town, or a nearby suburb/town. This includes digitised and non-digitised titles. Digitised titles include a link to Trove.

Photographs

I thought it would be cool to include a few photographs of the current suburb or town. To do this, I downloaded a list of place names from VicNames, then used the place names to search the SLV catalogue for photographs with relevant subject headings. A random selection of the harvested images is displayed in my place.

The interface

The interface is pretty simple. You type an address in the box and hit enter. If the geocoding process finds multiple matches, it’ll give you a list to choose from. Once the location is found, a marker is added and the main map re-centres. Then related resources are displayed below the map.

As you scroll down through the results you gradually zoom out from your initial starting point. This is reflected in the four bands or layers used to group resources: ‘my house’, ‘my street’, ‘my suburb’, and ‘nearby’. Each band contains a mix of resources from different collections.

When I started working on my place, I was thinking about a project from around 2010 called The History Wall. Like my place, The History Wall pulled many different types of resources together into a rich exploratory interface. As you scrolled through The History Wall you moved through time, with randomly selected items appearing from a range of sources including Trove newspapers, the ADB, and museum collections.

I originally thought I’d inject some of the same randomness into my place, but I was worried it might just get too confusing. I thought it was important to keep the relationship between the starting point and the resources in focus even as you zoomed out. So my visual metaphor shifted to something more like a blast radius map, or a stratigraphic diagram, that displayed distinct groups and layers as you moved beyond the baseline. My limited CSS skills couldn’t make the vision in my head a reality, but there are lots of headings and colours instead to highlight the transitions!

The actual mix of groups and layers displayed depends on the nature of your query. If you’ve entered a complete street address, and there are results for that address in Sands & Mac, then you’ll see ‘my house’, ‘my suburb’, and ‘nearby’. If you’ve only entered a suburb or town, or your street address can’t be found, you’ll see two layers starting with ‘my suburb’.

Here’s an overview of what you might expect to see.

my house

• Sands & MacDougall extracts (text search on full address)
• georeferenced maps (search for maps that contain the base point)
• parish maps (search for maps that contain the base point)
  

my street

• CUA photos (search for matching street identifiers)

if there’s no ‘my house’ layer:

• Sands & MacDougall extracts (text search on street name and suburb)
• georeferenced maps (search for intersections between maps and street)
• parish maps (search for intersections between maps and street)
  

my suburb/town

• suburb boundaries from OSM
• images (search for suburb name in metadata)
• newspapers (search for suburb name in metadata)

if there’s no ‘my house’ or ‘my street’ layer:

• georeferenced maps (search for intersections between maps and suburb boundaries)
• parish maps (search for intersections between maps and suburb boundaries)
  

nearby

• CUA photos (search for photosets within 5km of the base point, filtered to remove current street)
• georeferenced maps (search for maps within 10km of base point, ordered by distance, max of 24 displayed)
• parish maps (search for maps within 10km of base point, ordered by distance, max of 24 displayed)
• newspapers (search for newspapers within 100km of base point, ordered by distance, max of 24 displayed)
  

The data

Most of the data used in my place is stored in two SQLite databases – one for Sands & Mac, and the other for CUA, georeferenced maps, parish maps, and newspapers. The metadata for the collection images is stored in a JSON file that is directly loaded by the interface.

I’ve published the SQLite databases online using Datasette and Spatialite. Spatialite makes it possible to find geospatial features that intersect, or are near, a given point. For example, you could find maps that include a specific set of coordinates.

Datasette has the ability to create ‘canned queries’ that feed url parameters into pre-defined SQL queries. This coupled with Datasette’s built-in JSON API makes it possible to construct query urls in my place and use them to retrieve JSON results data from my databases.

When you enter an address in my place, multiple queries are fired off to find intersecting or nearby resources. For example, this url finds georeferenced maps within 10km of a point at the centre of Fitzroy: slv-places-481615284700.australia-southeast1.run.app/georefere…&distance=10000&_shape=array.

In the case of Sands & Mac, my place uses a canned query that runs a full-text search across the OCRd content of a volume. Suburb names are often abbreviated in Sands & Mac, so the app first runs a query to find possible abbreviations, then adds them into the main query to inject a bit of fuzziness. This is repeated for all 24 digitised volumes.

Once the metadata is retrieved from the databases, images are loaded from the SLV’s IIIF service.

Next steps?

I’m not sure how much more work I’ll do on my place, but there are a few things I’d like to try. In particular, I’d like to help the user understand more about what data is being presented, or not presented, and why. Not all digitised maps have been georeferenced, not all parish maps have coordinates, street numbers have changed, and the OCR in Sands & Mac varies in quality. my place can only present a sample – a gesture towards the wealth of material available from the SLV. I feel that message needs to be made more explicit. Though I’m not sure how without overloading the interface.

There are additional data sources I’d like to play around with. my place already includes some code to query Wikidata for more information about a suburb. But I haven’t had a chance to do anything with it. I’d like to be able to provide additional contextual information from outside the SLV, such as electoral boundaries, populations, even election results. It would also be fun to display sightings of plants and animals from the Atlas of Living Australia.

What can I find out about my house? It would be great if my place could answer that question by taking the user on an open ended journey through our cultural, historical, and environmental landscape.