#18 Maps and Geotagging

I loved this lesson! The fact that my husband and I are planning a trip to Spain made this lesson particularly relevant.

I have used Google Maps before and a lot of what you get in Google Earth is in Google Maps...but Google Earth has so much more. Currently I am not very interested in Mars, undersea geography or the constellations of outer space, but there is a lot of information on Google Earth for those who are. I like how there are connections to information sources on their tutorials. I can see how this would be handy for students and telescope hobbiests.

I did use this lessoon to find out more about the towns and cities we are going to visit. I looked at the city centers... finding the points of interest(photos included), transportation hubs, and lodging locations. Some of the lodging even showed on Google Earth marked by little red beds, restaurants as little knife and fork symbols. All of this is helping us make our decisions about where to stay and what to see. In Madrid I zoomed down to street view and traveled the streets where a group of hostels were located and found the area full of graffiti and questionable shops. Needless to say, I talked my husband out of booking accommodations in any of those hostels.

Not all of the city and towns have street level views (Edmonds does). I saw a progran on television recently that showed how the street views are done. There is an Oregon company that is hired by Google to travel through all the streets of major cities. They do this in teams of 2 or 3, using volkswagen bugs with multi-lensed cameras (64 lenses in an orb on a pole) mounted on their hoods. The task must be difficult in cities with many narrow, winding, one-way streets.

In conclusion, Google Earth (as well as other map programs) is fun and is a useful tool for librarians to share with their patrons when seeking travel or geographic information.