Place Entities

This documentation describes the process for adding, editing, and managing Place Entities in Islandora for the Marmot Digital Archive.

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Table of Contents

Place Entity basics

Places fall into 2 categories:

• Specific locations with an address and/or exact latitude and longitude.

• Regions such as a county, national park, city, state, or country. Regions always require entities.

Specific locations only need an entity if they are considered important enough; in other words if something significant happened there or if it is the address of an important person or organization. One way to think about it is whether or not the place deserves a Wikipedia entry. Ernest Hemingway’s House in Key West (The Ernest Hemingway House, officially known as the Ernest Hemingway Home & Museum) deserves a place entity due to his relative fame and the fact that it is currently a museum.

Adding a Place Entity

Search in Islandora

The first step for adding any entity in Islandora is to search to see if the entity already exists to make sure you do not create a duplicate.  Entities are shared across all libraries within Marmot. 

Open

Islandora is not always the best search engine, so you can use the Facets sidebar to limit your search by Islandora Place Model.   This will limit your results to anything that is a place entity.

Open

 

 

If you do not find the place entity, go to Add A Place.

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Add a Place

Go to Entity Shortcuts on the main page, and click Add A Place.

The Display Name should be a narrative description of the place followed by some indication of where the place is for disambiguation. Usually this will be at minimum the state, but can also include the county, city/town, or other region (such as White River National Forest). If the place covers more than one region, the larger region should be noted (examples: “Animas River, United States of America,” “Rocky Mountains, North America”).

Subject has a drop down menu to pick Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) or Local subject headings for the place. Subjects are not as crucial for places as they are for other entities and objects in the archive, but they are still useful. Only add subjects here when they are highly relevant to the place.  

If you have a book about the place, you can look up the book in the catalog to get those subject headings.  You can copy those subject headings as long as they are significantly relevant to the place. It is best to include LCSH for the organization, if they exist. You can also use Local subject headings to add topics that do not exist in LCSH. You can use a local vocabulary maintained by your library or collect terms from another source.  Term can be used to add additional information about the LCSH or Local subject heading. Clicking on the Add button will add the subject headings, and create a new tab add another entry. 

Alternate Name(s) are other names the place might be known by. For example, you could enter “Bonedale” for Carbondale, Colorado.

Place Date Start / Place Date End is for the place was founded and/or the date the place ceased to exist or was renamed. For example, for the Sears Tower, Chicago, Illinois, the start date would be 1973 and the end date would be 2009. There would be a separate entity for the Willis Tower (the new name for the Sears Tower) with a start date of 2009 and no end date.

Latitude/Longitude information should be entered as decimal degrees.

To find the latitude and longitude for a specific place, find that place on Google Maps, then right click on the place, choose “What’s here?” and you will get the latitude and longitude. You will get more accurate numbers if you zoom in quite a bit. This technique is better for specific locations rather than regions.

Physical Address information is entered when applicable/available. Follow the instructions under the fields.

Same Place As is entered if the place is exactly the same as another Place entity, but was known by a different name during a different time period. There should be separate entities for the two names and the entities should reference each other using this set of fields. Examples: Defiance, Colorado is the same place as Glenwood Springs, Colorado and the Sears Tower is the same place as the Willis Tower.

External Link is an important field for place entities. Ideally this is where Who’s on First or GeoNames references are made.

Other useful External Links Types are Wikipedia or relatedPika links. There are several Type options available from the XML form in the browser link under the Type field.

Who’s On First

To find a reference, go to Who's On First and search for your location. Below the map, you will see options for potential place matches, click on the one that matches the place you’re looking for. You should now see a map of the place you’re looking for (see example below). Copy the URL for this page and add it as a whosOnFirst External Link.

GeoNames

Go to http://www.geonames.org/ and search for your entity, clicking on the closest match in the search results. Click on the Map Icon in the bottom tool bar from your chose result.

Click on the map icon on the loaded map, then click on the toolbar that reads “Found (NUMBER) items in this area” to expand the list of options.

Choose the entry that matches the location you’re searching for. You will then see a pop-up for that place. Click on the .rdf link. Copy the URL from the page that loads and add it as a geoNames external link. If the page downloads a file or does not load, right-click on the RDF link, choose “Copy link location/Copy link address” and paste it into the geoNames External Link field.

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Add a Place (continued)

Notes is where you enter any additional information about the place that is not relevant for another field.

Related Place is where you enter Place PIDs for related Place entities. You may need to create a new Place entity to create the Related Place relationship.

Leave both of the Pika Options as YES. This will include the place as an entity in Pika.  

Click Ingest to complete the form and add the Place.

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Adding a Thumbnail Image

The best practice for adding a thumbnail for an organization that is being added to the archives is to find a picture of the place in the archives from a different location.  Anyone can edit the entities.  If someone saved a new thumbnail to the organization entity, it would remove any previous images.  This is why it is best to get the image from a different location.  

Click on Manage under the place name. Click on Datastreams.

Then click on the Add a datastream link.

For Datastream ID enter TN, for Datastream Label enter Thumbnail, and then browse to the image file you want to add, upload it, and click Add Datastream.

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Managing and Editing Places

Go To Places under the Entity Shortcuts.  Click on the Place entity that you want to manage.

Click on Manage located under the Place name. Click on Datastreams.

The Datastreams shows all the different representations of the place.  If the place had a thumbnail photo attached, there would be information about the image.  This will also show the name of the place and the PID.  The only one you can edit will be the MODS.  MODS is the equivalent of MARC. Click edit.

This will bring up the Edit datastream screen where any of the original fields can be edited.

Click Update to save any changes.

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