Making Dynamic Digital Maps
With the public's demand and dependence on digital resources as a primary source of information, educators and scientists who want to communicate geographic information face the difficult problem of how to most effectively distribute their products in this new medium. High quality color maps, images, movies, analytical data and explanatory text, including field guides, can be integrated in a cross-platform, web enabled Dynamic Digital Map format that is intuitive to use, easily and quickly searchable, and requires no additional proprietary software to operate. The media are stored outside the program, which acts as an organizational framework and index to present these data. A cross-platform, open-source DDM-Template into which one can insert their data, and an accompanying "Cookbook" on how to do this are available at http://ddm.geo.umass.edu, along with more than 10 DDMs that demonstrate this potential. Making stand-alone DDMs from the Template requires the use of the English-language programming environment Revolution (www.runrev.com) which has a low learning curve and excellent built-in tutorials.
Christopher D. Condit, Associate Professor of Geosciences
Location: W.E.B. Du Bois Library, Room 1320