[Web4lib] Re: Virtual Library tours

[Steve Lawson]

I received a request off-list that I supply a few details to the list
about how I made the virtual tour of the UCSD S&E Library,
<http://scilib.ucsd.edu/welcome/tour/main.html>. For those who are
interested, here is what I recall.

There were extant maps of the library, either already in digital form,
or in a form that I could scan. That saved a lot of time trying to
make a reasonable scale map of the general floor plan.

I opened those maps in Fireworks and drew the colored boxes for the
different areas of the library on a new layer (or probably multiple
layers). I didn't worry overly about exact size or proportion--I took
more of a London Undergound map approach of trying to show the
relationship between areas rather than worrying about making one pixel
equal 3 inches or something like that.

I believe I also erased or obscured many of the details on the base
map, leaving just the main outlines. I knew the map would be a bit
busy, so I wanted to remove all extraneous details. (Since I left they
seem to have added in some stuff that I purposely left out; things
like fire extinguishers. If the building is on fire and you are
consulting the virtual tour to find the extinguishers, there is a
problem.)

Fireworks has a tool that makes it quite easy to create an image map
like the ones I used; click and drag to define your hotspots and fill
in the URL for the link in a floating palette. Export the image and
get the GIF or JPEG and an HTML file for the imagemap. Fireworks is
quite easy to use for fairly simple projects like this one. I was
using it again recently for a navigation banner, and some of the code
it generates is a little wonky and required some hand-editing. YMMV.

And that's about it--no Flash, no JavaScript (except for those few
pages which cycle through multiple images).

-- 
Steve Lawson, Humanities Librarian
Tutt Library, Colorado College
slawson at coloradocollege.edu
IM (AIM & Yahoo!): tuttlawson
blog: http://library.coloradocollege.edu/steve/