Back to the main Technical Support Page
Troubleshooting Problems with Reference Images
These notes are intended to help you if you are having trouble with getting reference images to display when you click on the reference image links on the Item Details page.
Important Note! Reference images are only
accessible from the Item Details page, where the full information for a
single record is displayed. On the Match List page, where all matching records
from a search are shown as a list, you can not bring up
reference image by clicking on the little camera icon (
).
This camera icon only serves to let you know which records have reference
image links. To actually bring up a reference image, you must first switch
to the Item Details page for that record, and there click on the blue, underlined
link for the reference image.
The reference link on the Item Details page identifies which institutional library the image is located at. If no image comes up, or you get an error message when trying to bring an image up, then you should note the name of the library, and then read the troubleshooting notes for that library in the following table.
| Library Name | Troubleshooting Notes | |
| Library of Congress - American Memory | No known problems. | |
| David Rumsey Map Collection | Note: In March, 2007 the technical support organization for the Rumsey Collection informed me that the next release of the Insight Browser would utilize a different approach to presenting map images in a web browsing environment. That new release, which might become available by fall 2007, will hopefully eliminate the various problems which are described and discussed in the following paragraphs. Therefore, if you are unable to currently configure your system so that the links to the Rumsey Collection images work, you may at least be able to look forward to a time in the not-too-distant future when these links will once again become usable. The Rumsey Collection's Insight Browser uses pop-up windows to bring up its map images, and if you have set your web browser to block pop-ups, you will get an error message when trying to view a map image from the Rumsey Collection. If you see a message indicating that the browser has blocked the request, then you should modify your browser's settings to allow pop-ups when at the www.davidrumsey.com web site. Nearly all modern browsers (or the security packages, such as Norton Internet Security, which integrate with browsers and which provide pop-up blocking as one of their capabilities), provide a way to specify individual web sites as exceptions to the pop-up blocking rules. You may need to look at the help system provided by your browser (or security package) to find out how to do this, as the specific steps involved vary from browser to browser. For more information on avoiding pop-up blockers when at the Rumsey site, see help at the Rumsey site, or, in particular, the support page on Firewalls/Pop-ups that the Rumsey site refers to. The technique used to bring up images from the Rumsey Collection normally results in two new windows appearing on your screen. The first window to appear connects to the Rumsey site and launches the second window (with a black background and a vertical orientation) to display the zoomable image. Normally this works OK, but sometimes the synchronization of windows results in the first (mostly empty) window lying on top of, and mostly obscuring, the map image window. This is easily dealt with by closing the obscuring window or by clicking on some visible part of the map image window, which will bring it forward. But this minor annoyance, as well as the annoyance of having to clean up (close) two, rather than just one, window after you are finished looking at the reference image, is a bit of a drawback. If you running Windows and you use Internet Explorer as your web browser, then you can follow the suggestion, below, for letting the AMPR program use a different method to invoke the Rumsey Collection images. This alternative method results in just one window, with the map image, being shown on your screen. (Two other windows are temporarily created and shown in this process, but they are automatically closed, leaving just the one desired window displayed.) Note: In September, 2006, a user reported that when clicking on a Rumsey Collection image link, an endless series of Internet Explorer windows were brought up, and that the Task Manager had to be used to terminate Internet Explorer to stop this runaway behavior. I have been able to reproduce this problem as well, using Internet Explorer 6 on a Windows 2000 machine, as well as with IE 7 on a Windows XP machine. The Rumsey Collection has been notified of this problem and I hope that in time they will be able to provide a solution by modifying their server's behavior. (As of March, 2007 this problem is still there.) In the mean time, I, and several users, have found that the best alternative is to use Firefox (or any browser other than IE) for accessing images from the AMPR. (Note that even if your default browser is Internet Explorer, you can tell the AMPR program to use a browser other than the default one for any action that requires it to invoke a browser (and that, of course, includes displaying reference images). See start-up problem #6 on the technical support page for instructions on how to tell the AMPR program to invoke a specific browser. On occasion I have noticed that clicking on a link to the Rumsey Collection fails the first time I have tried to display an image from this collection during a session. The failure is in the form of a browser window displaying a message indicating that authorization to access to the Rumsey Collection has failed, and please try again. Simply clicking a second time on the image link mostly seems to result in a successful image display, and further displays of Rumsey images during the same session don't have this problem. So it is worth just trying a second time if your first attempt fails. (On the Mac, I have also seen occasional error windows, regarding an error with the URL, on the second, successful, attempt to display a Rumsey image. This error seems spurious, since the display succeeds. Simply close the error message window; subsequent displays of Rumsey images within the session will not generate this error.) |
|
| Harvard Map Collection | No known problems. | |
| Private Collection | The private collection uses Macromedia Flash technology for viewing zoomable map images. Macromedia Flash operates as a small plug-in to your web browser. Since many sites use this Macromedia Flash technology (including the zoomable images that you will find at the Old World Auctions and Paulus Swaen map auction sites), you probably already have this plug-in installed. However, if you have never before used Macromedia Flash for viewing web content, then the first time that you click on a Private Collection image link, you may see a message such as the following:
Follow the steps indicated for downloading and installing the Macromedia Flash plug-in on your browser. This usually involves a quick download of an executable file, which is then run to install the plug-in. Your browser will probably close and re-start after the plug-in installation has been completed. (This is not a major installation of new software; you won't have to re-boot your computer or anything like that.) Once the plug-in is installed, go back to the AMPR program and click again on the link to the Private Collection image. It should now work. The description, above, applies to Internet Explorer running under Windows. With other browsers or on the Macintosh you may not get the message and automatic prompt to install the plug-in. Instead, if the zoomable images do not display, you may need to manually download and install the Flash plug-in. This can be done at the following internet address: http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash. |
|
| National Library of Australia | No known problems. | |
| Boston Public Library (Norman B. Leventhal Map Center) | No known problems. | |
| National Maritime Museum (Greenwich) | No known problems. |
Suggested Configuration for
Linking to Rumsey Collection Images with Internet Explorer on Windows
(Note: This configuration was tested, but did not work,
on the Macintosh. Therefore these instructions are for Windows users only.)
Follow these steps:
1) Exit out of the Antique Map Price Record program, if it is currently running.
2) Open Notepad (or any other simple text editor).
3) Choose Open from the File menu; navigate to the C:\Program Files\AMPR\home directory and open the file named prefs.cgl. (If you installed the program to some non-standard location, then navigate to the home sub-directory of wherever it was that you installed the program, and find and open the prefs.cgl file there.)
4) Add the following line to the prefs.cgl file (you can add
the line at the bottom or anywhere in the file, but it should be on a line
by
itself):
AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_RUMSEY
: "use Rumsey_IE"
Be sure to enter the line exactly as shown here, with the same use of capitalization
and with the colon and double-quotes as shown. (It is probably simplest to
just copy the text from the line on this page and paste it into your text editor.)
5) Save the file and exit from the text editor.
6) Run the Antique Map Price Record program. Do a search for map images that include image links to the Rumsey Collection. (For example, search for COLTON as map-maker and MINNESOTA as region. All the returned records have image links to the Rumsey Collection.) Go to the Item Details page for a record and click on the Reference Image link. Confirm that the result is the desired display of just the one window containing the zoomable image. (If, for whatever, reason, this does not work as expected, or, especially, if it works worse than it did before, exit the program, go back and edit the prefs.cgl file, and remove the AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_RUMSEY line that you previously added in.)
Customizing Image Links
Warning! I strongly advise against trying to customize image links, as described here, without first contacting me (Jeremy Pool) at MapRecord Publications (contact information at my home page). The web addressing used to bring up image links is quite obscure, and it is much more likely that you will impair, rather than improve, your ability to view reference images if you attempt to perform customization without fully understanding what you are doing. I am happy to discuss this topic with any user who really wants to attempt to do this and to help them do this successfully.
The Antique Map Price Record program has built-in capability for linking to the images in all of the collections that it uses for these Reference Image links. The program works by taking, for each collection, a standard web address (URL), but with one or more "placeholder" parameters within that URL; each individual map record has the value(s) for those placeholders. After the placeholder parameters are replaced by the appropriate values, the resulting URL is passed to your web browser, and the desired map image page is displayed.
The built-in (standard) URLs for all the utilized collections are stored in a file named AMPRImages.dat, which is located in the "data" folder on the CD-ROM. It is possible, though very unlikely, that at some time in the future you may want or need to modify the standard URL for a particular collection. This could conceivably happen should a particular institutional collection change the fundamental web addressing scheme that it uses for accessing the digital maps in its collections. (This is quite unlikely, and I would track any such change and reflect it on the next edition of the CD-ROM. However, there is some small chance that you might want to make such a change to one of the standard URLs during the year of the current CD-ROM.)
To modify the standard URLs, do the following (these instructions are for Windows; Macintosh users should contact MapRecord Publications by phone or e-mail to get equivalent instructions for how this can be done for the Macintosh version):
1) Copy the file data\AMPRImages.dat from the CD to the C:\Program Files\AMPR\home directory. (If you installed the AMPR program in some non-standard location, copy the file to the home sub-directory of wherever the program is installed.)
2) Edit the copied AMPRImages.dat file with a text editor,
such as Notepad. (Note that some of the lines in this file are quite long.
You should turn word-wrap off in your text editor so that you don't mistake
a long, wrapped line for a separate line in the file.) Each line in this
file has three fields, separated with tabs:
i.) The code name for the collection.
ii.) The displayed name for the collection (which you will
see displayed in the AMPR program).
iii.) The standard URL, with its parameterized placeholders
shown as numbers preceded by a dollar-sign character($1, $2, etc).
To change the standard URL for a given collection, edit only the third part
of the line. (Since the tabs between the three parts of the line look just like
one or more spaces, be careful not to touch these parts of the line; only edit
the text following the last tab. If you accidentally change a tab to a space
character, the line will no longer function properly.) Save the file and exit
the text editor.
3) Try running the AMPR program, find a record with a Reference Image in the collection whose standard URL you edited, and click on the link to see if the desired image comes up as expected.
Note: You will probably have noticed in the AMPRImages.dat file that the Library of Congress collection is represented by several different lines, with different code names and different custom URLs. This is due to some variation in how different images in the American Memory collection are accessed. By far the majority of images from this collection are addressed using the standard URL from the first of these lines, the one with the code name "LOC".
Suppressing Image Links for a Particular Collection
It is possible, though not likely, that you will find that you want to explicitly avoid ever trying to view images from a particular collection. If, for some unexpected reason, every time you try to access an image from a certain collection, your browser misbehaves in some horrible way, and you can't figure out how to avoid this problem, you might decide that you just want the program to hide all the links for that collection. You can do this by editing the prefs.cgl file (see steps 1 to 3, in the section, above, describing how to configure the program for Internet Explorer on Windows). Add a line (or lines) to the prefs.cgl file that looks like this:
AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_XXXXX : "NONE"
where XXXXX is replaced by the upper-case code-name for the particular collection. The added lines must be entered exactly as shown in the third column of the following table. It is best to just copy the text from here and paste it into the editor where you are modifying the prefs.cgl file.
| Collection | Code-name(s) | Line(s) to add to prefs.cgl to suppress links to this collection's images |
| David Rumsey Collection | RUMSEY | AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_RUMSEY : "NONE" |
| Library of Congress | LOC |
AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_LOC : "NONE" AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_LOC2 : "NONE" AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_LOC3 : "NONE" AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_LOC4 : "NONE" |
| Harvard Map Collection | HARVARD | AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_HARVARD : "NONE" |
| Private Collection | MRP | AMPR_IMAGE_PATTERN_MRP : "NONE" |
Note that four different code-names are used for different images from the Library of Congress. To suppress all Library of Congress image links, you need to add all four of the shown lines to the prefs.cgl file.
Note for Macintosh users: The same steps described here for suppressing image links can be used on the Macintosh, but the preference file is different. The file is named CG++ Prefs, and this file is located in the Preferences sub-folder of the System Folder of your system hard drive.