In late spring, we heard from the University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership’s team that they would soon have A LOT of climate maps to share online. They needed a good way to host, organize, and share them in a way that wouldn’t bog down their website.
We quickly landed on a solution: Elevator. Elevator is an UMN-built tool that we first leveraged for Extension’s image gallery.
According to their own GitHub documentation, “Elevator can store content in any format, such as images, audio, video, 3D objects, Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) bundles, and Portable Document Files (PDF) files. Elevator also provides a suite of standard tools for previewing and playing even exotic assets, like 3D walkthroughs and rotatable 3D objects.”
While we didn’t need all that functionality for this project, it’s good to know its full functionality.
Elevator’s flexible organization allowed us to create a variety of “collections” to group the over 140 maps in different ways:
- Historical
- Precipitation
- Temperature
- Intermediate Emissions
- Mid-Century
- Precipitation
- Temperature
- End-of-Century
- Precipitation
- Temperature
- High Emissions
- Mid-Century
- Precipitation
- Temperature
- End-of-Century
- Precipitation
- Temperature
Elevator is also designed to run on the Amazon Web Services, which integrated well into our existing web hosting processes and is a common-good service in Extension, funded through ELT.
The climate image gallery is a joint collaboration between Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership (MCAP) and University of Minnesota Extension. University of Minnesota Climate Adaptation Partnership’s Postdoctoral Associate, Dr. Suzanna Clark, created the maps and ELT’s Developer, Caleb Twiggs, organized them in the climate image gallery — a flexible, sustainable, UMN-built tool!
Comments
Post a Comment