Where in the world?

The title of this blog has a double meaning, as you will see. At ALA during a session about OCLC's ContentDM, I was intrigued by something that was said about an Iowa librarian who had figured out a way to put placemarks in Google Earth that linked back to their original content. I've spent the last month or so wading through confusing and sometimes contradictory instructions about the care and feeding of KML files - these are specialized XML files for adding placemarks to Google Earth and Google Maps. I had worked with XML before and had a sense of how unforgiving the format is for any kind of sloppiness. Still, the goal seemed worth the trouble - nobody is going to go broke betting on Google in the future, so I wanted to be part of the revolution.

I had already got involved in adding simple pictures to Google Earth. That is just a matter of uploading files to a web site called Panoramio and flagging the location on a map. After a few weeks, Google evaluates the pictures - nearly all of mine were approved, but that doesn't mean they'll show up in Google Earth any time soon. In some cases such as very popular locations like Central Park, they may be approved but never added. For reasons that elude me, some of these pictures also show up in Google Maps.

All I wanted was a template - a recipe for creating a page that had a picture, a space for text describing our work, and the ability to create a link. I wanted too much. I had to cobble together a file that incorporated bits and pieces of what Google had put in their tutorials. The main lesson I got from the initial read was that I needed to create the files and mount them on the web as KMLs. Since their spider doesn't look for KMLs, I had to create a second KML file called a sitemap that described the location of the other files that I wanted Google to see. That one was fairly simple to create. For some reason, I couldn't get this to work from the Quinnipiac pages, so I added the sitemap file to my Geocities page terryballard.org.

To further muddy the waters, Google Earth has a Gallery with a form for quickly adding KML files. They only insist that the file as an author and description. However, if you have an author line, you also have to replace the first two lines of the standard KML to add coding that invokes Atom:Author. Then, when you do that, the Gallery program will not accept your file. I found out later that the KMLs will not really work unless you have the Atom line. There is a KML developers online group run by Google that is well-patrolled by experts, and that helped me over a few rough spots. I did manage to find a balloon template that I was able to integrate with a stripped-down KML file that is everything I hoped for. You can see a sample of the results at http://www.terryballard.org/glendaloughbyfinerty2.kml . If you have Google Earth loaded on your machine, that should start it up and automatically go to that spot. It looks fantastic, but I'll need to wait weeks before I find out if it gets added to Google Earth on its own.

Actually, after collecting numerous bumps on my head from hitting the wall, I came across the best answer. There is a site called Google Earth Community that has a quasi-official relationship with Google. You can post KML files there in unmoderated groups. If your file is noticed by a moderated group administrator, the message is moved up. On Sunday, August 24, my 62nd birthday, I made a posting to the Community (seehttp://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php/Cat/0/Number/1223296/an/0/page/0#1223296) . In a half hour it was moved up to the History moderated forum. In the first day, it was seen by a hundred people, and 25 of them followed up with clicking to see the placemark in Google. In a month or so, it should be added to Google Earth for people who have opted for Gallery/Google Earth Community. By now, the message has been visited by nearly 700 users. There have been a number of surprises on this journey, but the good ones make up for everything.