School of Information Management & Systems.   Spring 2003.
245 Organization of Information in Collections.   Michael Buckland.

Assignment: Organizing Information by Space and Time.   Incomplete DRAFT.

The purpose of this exercise is to explore the possibilities of organizing a collection by space and time.
This first time, we will do this exercise jointly.

1. Collect the following data: For each student, two or three records:
    - L: Up to two places you have lived and when;
    - C: One place you went to college and when.

2. Create an Excel spreadsheet with one row for each record and a column (in the following order) for each of the following: Name of person [Forename SURNAME]; Name of town; State/province; Country; Latitude; Longitude; Year residence started; Year residence ended.

Notes: Authoritative lists of place-names are known as gazetteers, which are most familiar from their use as an index at the back of an atlas. Examples of online gazetteers include:
- The Alexandria Digital Library Gazetteer Server
fat-albert.alexandria.ucsb.edu:8827/gazetteer/
For this exercise latitude and longitude need to be in or converted to a decimal form to four decimal places. To convert from the traditional degrees, minutes, and seconds to decimal form, one can use a converter, e.g.:


3. Create consolidated single spreadsheet.

4. Load into the Clearinghouse.

5. Create a MapSpace.

6. Use Java version of TimeMap to perform some visual analyses [to be specified].