-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Metadata standards for GPS coordinates? Date: Mon, 22 Feb 2010 09:41:33 -0500 From: Paige Andrew <[log in to unmask]> To: Maps, Air Photo, GIS Forum - Map Librarianship <[log in to unmask]>, [log in to unmask] References: <[log in to unmask]> Still come out looking like gibberish Angie, but that is because you cannot use a proper character set for special characters in something like email, it just doesn't recognize it. Ken's examples below are (and in doing cataloging would be flipped -- West and East hemispheres come first, followed by North and South): N 68[degrees]22.987[minutes]/W 146[degrees]24.882[minutes] N 48[degrees]15.048[minutes]/W 121[degrees]48.973[minutes] I also just read Joel's concern about using the + (plus) and - (minus) signs with decimal degrees and the confusion it can/may cause. Sure isn't easy to remember at first for me either, and yet that is because I have yet to become comfortable with the decimal degree format as I am with DMS format. But, that will have to change in time I suppose. And, the cataloger's out there should know that Joel's prompt several months ago got me, Susan Moore, and Mary Larsgaard busy helping OCLC to update the examples that are in OCLC's Bib. Input Standards for both the 034 field and the 255 field. You will note in particular that their is something like three variant methods for showing coordinates in decimal format, so the standard is allowing some flexibility here, which it needs to. OCLC finished updating the pages for the 034 and 255 fields with new/edited/changed examples, and the three of us who worked on this over a period of months aimed to make these as up-to-date and usable as possible -- we hope we succeeded! Paige At 09:09 AM 2/22/2010, Angie Cope wrote: >I'm forwarding Ken's original email again to see if the formatting can >come through correctly. I've heard from a few people that the original >message was gibberish. Let's try this again. > >-------- Original Message -------- > >Folks, my current work involves working in digital collections metadata, >and some digital objects have fairly detailed GPS coordinates provided. >Iâm wondering if there is a âbest practicesâ standard for their format, >which may vary considerably. Here are a couple of examples from recent >submissions: > >N 68°22.987´/W 146°24.882´ > >N 48 15.048° W 121 48.973° > >The first one looks better to me, but any advice on proper format, >including punctuation, will be welcome. I also note that it appears the >degree sign can be problematic for Content-dm to recognize, so maybe the >word âdegreesâ should be spelled out. > >Sorry if this is not as map-related as it should be, but it seems a good >forum to reach people who might also know something about this related >subject. > >--Ken Rockwell > >Univ. of Utah