Old Maps Online: Blog

General project update May 2012

2012-05-28T07:06:00.002-07:00

Most recent blog posts have been about our dissemination activities, but there is still plenty going on behind the scenes as well. The bi-annual Progress Report was due to JISC this week and we are ahead of schedule having already written and submitted this.

This week will see the second team meeting here in Portsmouth when we will be discussing where we stand on existing and planned content, how we might refine and improve the website and the plans for the site after the funding finishes next January. Towards the end of the week we will also hold our second Steering Group meeting and all the papers have been prepared for that.

As hinted in the previous post we have been working hard on adding new collections to the system and will be announcing the extra content imminently so keep an eye out.

LIBER Groupe des Cartothécaires & ICA Workshop in Barcelona

2012-05-11T08:27:00.001-07:00

This year Barcelona played host to librarians and researchers from 24 different countries as they met to present their results and ongoing projects working with old maps.

ICA & LIBER meeting: Petr Pridal and Humphrey Southall

There were two joined conferences which had very exciting programmes, both which are available online:

Several projects in which the Old Maps Online team participated recently were demonstrated, including:

Improvements to the crowdsourced georeferencing using Georeferencer, and its implementation in the British Library. (presentation)
Historical Maps API for developers of Google Maps API mashups and mobile applications from out-of-copyright old maps of Great Britain - released in co-operation with National Library of Scotland.
Open-Source technologies for delivering historical maps online
And of course the presentation of the OldMapsOnline project addressing the map curator community.

We are looking forward to announcing some new map collections joining the OldMapsOnline search portal soon.

Showcased on Google Developers web pages

2012-05-09T10:10:00.002-07:00

It seems Google keep tabs on what developers are doing with their technologies! We didn't know about it beforehand, but we are very pleased to see Old Maps Online is now featuring in the showcase of web applications they like in the Google Developers webpages.
See the Old Maps Online entry here: https://developers.google.com/showcase/#item=Old+Maps+Online

Publicising Old Maps Online

2012-04-19T04:00:00.000-07:00

Since the launch review post published a month ago, we have been continuing to demonstrate and publicise the existence of the website to a variety of audiences at every opportunity. On Thursday 22nd March Humphrey and Paula ran a session specifically about Old Maps Online at the UK Archives Discovery Forum 2012 held at The National Archives in Kew, London. The session was popular and those attending were very interested and complimentary about the website. Kimberly Kowal from the project's steering group also presented on the British Library's crowd sourcing project. This day was aimed at archivists involved in promoting working together to open up data access.

University of Glasgow

April 11th-16th saw many flyers being distributed and Humphrey and Paula demonstrating the web site in the main exhibition hall of the European Social Science History Conference held at the University of Glasgow. The conference attracts a large number of scholars interested in explaining historical phenomena using social science methodologies.

This week Humphrey and Petr will both be in Barcelona to present papers on the project at two events. Firstly at the 18th Conference of the LIBER Groupe des Cartothécaires - Maps Expert Group 'Map libraries in a changing world' on the 17-18th April. Humphrey will present 'Embedding historical maps in the practices of historical GIS and Geosemantics: From URLs to URls' whilst a member of the project steering group, Christopher Fleet from the National Library of Scotland, will present with Petr on 'Open source technologies for delivering historical maps online - case studies at the National Library of Scotland'.

For the remainder of this week, Humphrey and Petr will attend the 7th International ICA workshop 'Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage' where they will jointly present 'Old Maps Online: Enabling global access to historical mapping' during the first 'Map Libraries, Collections, Archives' session. During the second of these sessions Humphrey will act as co-chair and Petr will present a paper with Christopher Fleet on 'Opening historical maps for community mash-ups - a case study of the NLS Historical Maps API '. Petr will also present with Kimberly Kowal on 'Improvements to crowdsourced georeferencing using Georeferencer, and its implementation at the British Library' during the 'Georeferencing, Map Content' session and he will chair the session entitled 'Map Content, Territories, Urban cases'.

Meet us at ICA Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage - 7th International Workshop

2012-03-27T02:14:00.000-07:00

We are going to present the OldMapsOnline project at the ICA CartoHeritage Workshop in Barcelona. Feel free to join and personally discuss with our team the future of this search portal or your intended contribution.

Where:

Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya ICC, Barcelona, Spain 19-20 April 2012

Topics:

Digital map libraries and map collections: archiving, matching, management, networking and accessibility in-situ and in the web.
Development of methodologies and standards applied on proper two- and three- dimensional digitisation of Cartographic Heritage objects, materials and documents.
Digital map restoration.
Digital technologies in map collections, including the digitisation of collections.
Online presentation of maps in georeferenced and ungeoreferenced forms.
Discovery, accessibility and retrieval of materials through a range of portals, INSPIRE and SDIs.
New opportunities for cooperation and partnerships using digital technologies.
Developing tools for the long-term preservation of digital map content.
Open data relevant issues

More details at the workshop websites:

http://xeee.web.auth.gr/ICA-Heritage/2011_2015/BARCELONA_2012/

Review of Old Maps Online Launch

2012-03-15T04:02:00.003-07:00

Now the website has been live and accessible to the public for just over two weeks and the initial flurry of publicity is over we have a little time to pause and reflect on how the launch has gone.

We began with the special workshop "Working Digitally with Historical Maps" organised as part of the Association of American Geographers conference. It was held on the 25th February in the impressive Stephen A. Schwarzman Building the flagship building of the New York Public Library. The key note speech at that event announcing the website was jointly given by David Rumsey, Petr Pridal and Humphrey Southall.

The following Wednesday (29th) saw the main UK launch in the grand art deco surroundings of Chancellor's hall in Senate House, part of the University of London. The Gerald Alymer Seminar "Locating the Past" attracted 100 participants and saw a range of speakers talking about historical place and space from what we can learn spatially from paintings depicting Henry VIII's maritime battles, crowd-sourcing modern locations onto historical maps, linking places and surnames and mapping historical textual descriptions of places. The introduction to the day, including the announcement about the website launch, was given by Humphrey Southall whilst Paula gave demonstrations of the site in action throughout the day.

Wednesday last week (7th) saw Humphrey Southall again presenting and Paula demonstrating the site. This time in the equally appealing Weston room with its nineteenth century floor mosaic and stained glass windows in the Maughan Library at Kings College, London. The event involved a smaller, more specialised audience who work on bringing together geographical and historical data online discussed geocultures. Organised by the JISC-funded GECO project, "Geospatial" in the Cultural Heritage Domain, Past, Present & Future covered subjects as diverse as locating photos of London during the Blitz, charting information gleaned from historical ships logs, to ways of presenting historical Scottish city information through maps.

(Humphrey talking about Old Maps Online. Both images courtesy of JISC GECO project)

We will continue to demonstrate the website at upcoming events we are attending. Initial audience figures are good, by the 13th of March we had received nearly 150,000 unique users since we launched. This averages out at roughly 8,000 users per day, although our busiest day last week saw more than 30,000 unique users and over 10% of visitors returned.

We have had a reasonable amount of online press coverage and the site even appeared on Spanish TV. Although our press coverage has had less success in more traditional outlets we still feel relatively pleased with how well the message seems to be getting around. Something that is new to us, but has proved invaluable is the organic spread of knowledge about the site through social media. Twitter in particular has seen some very good comments and people around the world are still passing the site on this way.

Of course, like any new website which catches the public's attention, and as already mentioned in a previous posting, we have experienced some technical issues and in hindsight we perhaps should have left out the dynamic links to social media which caused most of them. The inclusion of a feedback feature and contact details seems to be positive move and has led to suggestions on what else people might like to see and offers to participate from more map collections and user testers.

Overall we are very pleased with the reaction to the launch of the site and we're now settling down to work hard on the next release.

Publicity for Old Maps Online -- and who is visiting

2012-03-08T03:22:00.003-08:00

Some on-line articles that have appeared about the site:

Gizmodo:
www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/03/easy-access-to-days-gone-by-with-old-maps-online

Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/old-maps-online-lets-you-find-your-way-around-17th-century-holy-roman-empire.ars

The Verge:
www.theverge.com/2012/3/5/2847607/old-maps-online-60000-library-search

About.com Geneaology:
http://genealogy.about.com/b/2012/03/07/old-maps-online-a-new-way-to-locate-historical-maps.htm

La Stampa (Milan):
http://www.lastampa.it/_web/cmstp/tmplrubriche/tecnologia/grubrica.asp?ID_blog=30&ID_articolo=10171&ID_sezione=38

Up to the end of Wednesday 7th March, we had had 81,276 "unique visitors", and the geographical distribution is interesting:

United States 25.7%

United Kingdom 14.3%

Italy 6.7%

Spain 5.9% (there was something on the TV in Barcelona)

Netherlands 5.3%

Russia 4.9%

Poland 4.7%

Romania 3.9%

Site a bit more stable now

2012-03-07T08:00:00.003-08:00

It is just after 4 on Wednesday afternoon in the UK, and the site seems to have been running fairly reliably for the last couple of hours, after a bumpy time this morning. We are currently handling around 1,700 simultaneous users, and both servers are reasonably happy.

It will be interesting to see if this level of interest is sustained.

Best laid plans ...

2012-03-06T22:42:00.002-08:00

Apologies for the break in service yesterday. It is still continuing as I write, but the fix is in and problems should disappear as soon at it gets copied into the production set-up, which cannot happen before the start of normal business hours in the UK.

The source of the problem is a doozy.

We have been using AddThis (http://www.addthis.com) to provide interactive sharing tools linking us to social networks: Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus. This meant that AddThis needed to send stuff (Javascript code) to our page in your browser for the page to work; the "page" is better thought of as a kind of program, and we needed them to provide a subroutine.

Yesterday this stopped working. We are not sure why, but suspect it had to do with our rapid growth in usage as yesterday we had over 25,000 different visitors to the site. We don't seem to be breaking their terms of (free) service, but maybe their automated systems decided we were some kind of attack.

Anyway, we have removed AddThis from our page, including instead simple static links to the social networks. The reason you cannot see this just yet is precisely because we did anticipate heavy demand: we have more than one server, accessed through a specialized "load balancer", and users won't see the fix until it is copied to the server clone.

We are an academic project aiming to provide a popular service to a wide audience that is free of charge to both map libraries and map users, and funded by a relatively small one-off project grant. That means we need to keep our own system as simple as possible and rely as much as possible for infrastructure on "free" services like Google Maps, Google Sites, Blogger, UserVoice ... and AddThis. However, it does make us dependent on others.

British Library Geo-referencing project completes in four days!

2012-03-04T22:28:00.005-08:00

The British Library's project to work with its users to geo-reference historical maps, announced her in an earlier posting, was expected to take some months but completed its work in under a week. This has enabled us to include over seven hundred maps from the original Ordnance Surveyors' drawings and from the Crace Collection in the first version of Old Maps Online.

The project used Klokan Technology's cloud-hosted Georeference software, and we would be very interested in discussing its use with other libraries who hold substantial numbers of scanned maps that lack geo-referencing. This is certainly not the only way to create the geo-referencing needed to add maps to Old Maps Online, but avoids both the need for manual geo-referencing by specialists and libraries having to set up specialised software.

The British Library are planning a second round of geo-referencing, with a further 1,000 maps, and we look forward to adding them to Old Maps Online.

Old Maps Online Launched

2012-02-29T15:12:00.000-08:00

Today sees the official UK launch of the new website associated with this blog Old Maps Online. Created in collaboration between Klokan Technologies GmbH based in Switzerland and the Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at the University of Portsmouth funded by JISC as part of their Content Programme for 2011-13 it offers a new way to search digitised historical maps.

Described by its creators as 'like google for old maps' it allows the user to zoom and pan on a world map, or type in a place name and instantly get a listing of maps available that most closely match the place and scale of map visible in the map viewer. Users can also narrow their search by date using a time slider bar. The default setting will locate the map viewer on the physical location of the user. As the user zooms in or pans the map listing is simultaneously updated. The map listing identifies maps by their name, publication information and presents a thumbnail image. Once the user finds a map they wish to investigate more closely, clicking on the map details in the listing will bring up the meta-data record for the individual map. From there the user can click through to immediately see a full-sized online image of the historical map at its host institution. There is no requirement for passwords, subscription or download to view the image.

This innovative search engine allows users to search through map catelogues across a number of institutions in a geographical way. Users will no longer have to spend time identifying which institution might hold the maps they want to view, as for the first time the holdings of individual map libraries are presented together in a single interface. Initial map holdings come from the David Rumsey Map Collection, The National Library of Scotland, The British Library, the Moravian Library and the map collection of A Vision of Britain through Time and more will be added over the coming months. Anybody interested in contributing maps from their own collection should see the contribution page of the website for further details.

Keynote by David Rumsey, Humphrey Southall and Petr Pridal
announcing the OldMapsOnline search engine in NYPL.

The site was launched at the New York Public Library during a special workshop 'Working digitally with Historical Maps' which was part the Association of Amercian Geographers' conference and at the Gerald Aylmer Seminar 2012 'Locating the Past' held today at Chancellor's hall in Senate House, which is part of the University of London.

http://www.oldmapsonline.org

Update: The presentation from the launch in New York Public Library is available on SlideShare.

Old Maps Online: New York Public Library Announcement

View more presentations from Petr Pridal

Course: Working Digitally with Historical Maps and Geographical Information -- Portsmouth, June 2012

2012-02-24T02:23:00.001-08:00

The Great Britain Historical GIS Team and the University of Portsmouth are running a one-week hands-on introduction to historical GIS methods on June 18th-22nd, 2012.

It is aimed at anyone wanting to create a digital resource from sources which are both historical and geographical – most obviously old maps, but also historical census information or geographically rich text. You may be planning on building a “historical GIS” or simply a web site with many maps – one aim is to help you decide the most appropriate final result for your particular sources and goals:

We will equip you to do a small project in historical GIS or map-based digitization; or to plan and manage a larger project – so we include both hands-on training with GIS software, and sessions on source selection, project planning, copyright and budgeting.
Hands-on training emphasizes Quantum GIS, a capable free open-source alternative to the commercial GIS software that historians and ‘memory institutions’ cannot afford, but most skills will be transferable to other programs.
Quantum excels in accessing standards-based on-line GIS services, such as web map servers providing base maps. We will show you how to avoid starting from scratch, by accessing new online services and download facilities within the GB Historical GIS.
Members of the GB Historical GIS team will teach core modules, but the course also features case studies presented by other members of Portsmouth Geography, and speakers from the Ordnance Survey, British Library and the National Archives.
Hands-on sessions will have a maximum of ten attendees per leader.
Our campus adjoins Portsmouth’s historic dockyard, home of the Royal Navy for five hundred years. The course includes a visit to the Admiralty Map Library, one of the world’s great historical map libraries but open to visitors only by special arrangement, and a dinner at the Royal Naval Club.
Portsmouth is an hour and a half from London by train, and easily reached from London Heathrow, London Gatwick and Southampton airports. Car parking can be arranged.

Portsmouth Geography is the base for the Great Britain Historical GIS project and several other major online resources. Uniquely, we have not just twenty years experience in historical GIS, but over ten years of experience in employing Geographical Information Systems technology in standards-based digitization projects, with funding from the UK National Lottery, the Joint Information Systems Committee and the European Union.

Course fee: £849, including lunches, refreshments and the Working Digitally dinner. Overnight accommodation for four to six nights is available for £37.50 per night (bed and breakfast). For more details and to register, visit:

http://www.port.ac.uk/workingdigitally

The British Library: Georeferencer Pilot

2012-02-15T02:44:00.000-08:00

The British Library announced a pilot project where general public is asked to help to georeference some of the treasures of British mapping. With the help of the online visitors the maps are for the first time overlayed on top of 3D terrain in Google Earth.
The scanned maps become also searchable by their geographic location, because the metadata in a library catalog are enriched with the numerical coordinates (formatted as MARC 034 or DCMI Box) - after review by librarians.

Would you like to try this tool and help British Library to georeference some of the maps? The process is very simple and documented in this video:

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://maps.bl.uk/"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/249/876/249876226_200.jpg" border=0 alt="The British Library: Georeferencer Pilot"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

You can get assigned a random map by clicking on a button "Fix the location of a map" displayed at http://maps.bl.uk/ or you can choose a map of your own preference in the BL Online Gallery.

After one day almost 300 maps were georeferenced by the volunteers! It seems to be a successful example of crowdsourcing in libraries.

The pilot is powered by the Georeferencer technology, which can be easily applied on the online maps in other libraries and archives too.

The British Library is a partner in our project, and therefore these maps will be in a near future added to the OldMapsOnline.org federated map search engine allowing search by location and time.

Progress towards Old Maps Online launch - 2

2012-02-14T01:00:00.000-08:00

The past two weeks has seen work continue on testing the functionality of the MapRank Search software on the new server.We've also been working on supporting documentation for the launch. We have been discussing press releases with the marketing people and creating draft versions of our Terms of Use and Frequently Asked Questions to help site users once we go live. The design of the launch flyers was completed and these have returned from the printers, we are sending them out for conference delegate packs as I type.

We have now started to advertise all the events where we will launch/present the website. For ease of reference a synopsis of these is given below. Please see the relevant blog posting/event website for more details about individual events.

25/02/2012 New York, USA: Workshop "Working Digitally with Historical Maps"
29/02/2012 London, UK: The Gerald Alymer Seminar "Locating the Past"
21/03/2012 London, UK: Meeting "UK Archives Discovery Forum"
11-14/04/2012 Glasgow, UK: European Social Science History Conference
17-18/04/2012 Barcelona, Spain: LIBER Conference "Map libraries in a changing world"
19-20/04/2012 Barcelona, Spain: ICA Workshop "Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage"
2-4/05/2012 Ávila, Spain: ESF Workshop "Conceptualising European Landscapes across languages, cultures and Disciplines"
27-30/06/2012 Albuquerque, USA: World History Association Conference "Frontiers and Borders in World History"
16-22/07/2012 Hamburg, Germany: Digitial Humanities 2012 Conference

Workshop: Working Digitally with Historical Maps (New York Public Library, Feb 25th)

2012-02-09T02:18:00.000-08:00

This one day workshop includes the launch of our new Old Maps Online web site. It forms part of the Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, but is being held in the South Court Auditorium of the Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Libraries — the building in Bryant Park most people think of as the New York Public Library. Attendees are not required to have conference badges, so if you happen to be near New York on the 25th …

WORKING DIGITALLY
WITH HISTORICAL MAPS

(1) BUILDING RICH RESOURCES (10:00 am – 11:40 am)

Max Edelson (Virginia): The “New Map of Empire” Project: Enhancing Cartography Scholarship with Dynamic Online Collections
Joseph Hurley (Georgia State): Visualizing Neighborhood Change: The Georgia State University Library Digital Map Collection, “Planning Atlanta: A New City in the Making, 1950s – 1980s”
Michael Page (Emory): Modeling the History of the City using Library Resources
Marcel A Fortin (Toronto) The Don Valley Historical Mapping Project
John Cloud (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration): Starting from Hassler’s Primary Triangle: The survey of the coast in “New York Bay and Harbor and the Environs” as the foundation for geo-spatial data for North America

(2) ENABLING ACCESS (12.40 – 2.20 pm)

Julie Sweetkind-Singer (Stanford): Digital Philanthropy: Increasing Access through Donor Collaboration
Matt Knutzen (New York Public Library): Open Historical Map
Bonnie Burns (Harvard) OpenGeoportal: A Collaborative Geographic Search Tool
Meredith Westington/Keith Bridge (National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration): The Value of a Bounding Box: Moving Historical Charts beyond the Image Browser
Gregory J Allord (US Geological Survey): USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection: Converting and Integrating lithographic maps into The National Map

(3) EXTRACTING AND DEFINING FEATURES (2.40 – 4.20 pm)

James Burt (US Geological Survey): Efficient Geo-referencing of Small-scale Scanned Map Images
Richard Marciano (North Carolina): Connecting People, Past, and Place: exploring semi-automated extraction of text and polygons from common historic sources
Andrea White (University of New Orleans) Creating an Archaeological Sensitivity Model for New Orleans using Historic Maps and Historical GIS
Anne Leonard (New York City College of Technology) Using old maps and new methods to discover the early chemical and petroleum industries of Newtown Creek
Stuart Macdonald (University of Edinburgh) Addressing History – Crowdsourcing the Past

(4) DIGITAL GAZETTEERS (4.40 – 5.40 pm)

Merrick Berman (Harvard) Historical Gazetteer Development and Integration: CHGIS, Regnum Francorum, and GeoNames
Raj Singh (Open Geospatial Consortium) Establishing a Global Data Sharing Framework for Place Names
Ashley Holt (National Geospatial intelligence Agency) Gazetteer representation of place name usage

(5) KEYNOTE: FINDING AND REFERENCING OLD MAPS ONLINE (6 – 7 pm)

This joint presentation will demonstrate and launch a new global search portal for digitised historical maps: Old Maps Online

Presenters:
David Rumsey (Cartography Associates)
Humphrey Southall (Univ of Portsmouth – Great Britain Historical GIS)
Petr Pridal (Klokan Technologies)

Note that the New York Public Library building closes at 6pm. Those wishing to attend this session must arrive by 5:45pm to be admitted to the building. The keynote is followed by a reception for the speakers at the workshop and other invited guests.
Session Organizers:
Humphrey Southall (GB Historical GIS, University of Portsmouth)
Matt Knutzen (New York Public Library)
Lex Berman (Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University)

Sponsors:
New York Public Library
Cartography Associates
Old Maps Online

UK Archives Discovery Forum Meeting (21st March 2012)

2012-02-02T03:03:00.000-08:00

The National Archives will host a day for the United Kingdom Archives Discovery (UKAD) Forum in March again this year. This network is a collaborative group of archives and other information professionals who work towards opening up data in order to promote the use of archives through the sharing of ideas about online access to archives and their data.

At last year’s meeting Humphrey Southall presented about A Vision of Britain through Time. This year will see a presentation and demonstration of the new Old Maps Online website being launched on 29th February. There will also be a presentation by another member of the steering group for Old Maps Online, Kimberly Kowal of the British Library, who will speak about their map crowd-sourcing project.

Attendance is free but places are limited, see their website for details on how to book a place.

Progress towards Old Maps Online launch - 1

2012-01-27T04:32:00.000-08:00

To keep you up-to-date in the lead up to the launch of the new Old Maps Online portal at the end of February 2012 we will produce a series of mini progress reports on project activities.

This week we have applied the new design to the project website and this blog - we hope you like the new colour scheme. The first publicity flyer is nearly drafted and we have also implemented the MapRank Search software on our new server to do some functionality testing without various presentation features.

Free One Day Conference: Locating the Past (London, 29th Feb 2012)

2012-01-17T02:16:00.000-08:00

The UK launch of the new "Old Maps Online" web site will occur during this year's Gerald Aylmer Seminar, sponsored by the UK National Archives, the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research. This year the seminar is specifically focused on historical GIS and the event will also include an introduction to the field of historical GIS by Dr Humphrey Southall, Project Director of the currently funded JISC Old Maps Online project, who has been part of the seminar organising committee.

It is being held at the Chancellors' Hall, University of London Senate House, on Wednesday 29th February.
ATTENDANCE IS FREE BUT NUMBERS ARE LIMITED so please contact Ruth Roberts at the National Archives for an invitation.

PROGRAMME:

9:30am 9:50am: Coffee and registration

9:50am 10:00am: Welcome by Colin Jones (Royal Historical Society)

10:00am 10:30am: Introduction by Humphrey Southall (GBH GIS/Portsmouth), providing an overview of the field.

10:30am 11:45pm: Panel 1: SOURCES:
Three 15 minute presentations reviewing some of the sources available in developing historical geographic information systems, followed by an open discussion:

Kimberley Kowal (British Library)
Dominic Fontana (Portsmouth University)
Andrew Hudson-Smith (CASA/UCL, Tales of Things: Electronic Memory project)

11:45am 12:00pm: New approaches and technologies at The National Archives by David Thomas

12:00pm 12:45pm: LUNCH

12:45pm 2:00pm: Panel 2: APPLICATIONS/RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
Three 15 minute presentations considering relevant research questions and applications, followed by an open discussion:

Ian Gregory (Liverpool University)
Richard Coates (University of the West of England)
Nigel Walford (Kingston University).

2:00pm 3:15pm: Panel 3: AUDIENCES AND ENGAGEMENT:
Three 15 minute presentations on achieving wider public impact, followed by an open discussion:

Caroline Kimbell (The National Archives)
Bruce Gittings (Edinburgh University)
Nick Stanhope (HistoryPin).

3:15pm 3:45pm: TEA BREAK

3:45pm 4:45pm: Keynote speech: Place and the politics of the past by Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire)

4:45pm 5:00pm: Closing comments

Remember, attendance is free but numbers are limited so you MUST contact the National Archives for an invitation.

More about Chancellors Hall

New ‘Old Maps Online’ project funded

2011-11-28T03:14:00.000-08:00

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) have awarded a grant of £139,900 as part of their JISC Content Programme for 2011-13 for a new project called Old Maps Online: Finding and referencing historical mapping as a platform for research and teaching, which runs for fifteen months from November 2011.

Working together the GB Historical GIS project team, based at the University of Portsmouth, and Klokan Technologies GmbH will be creating a separate open access web site enabling users to search for online maps across many different digital libraries, based not on the titles of maps or who drew them, but on the places the user is interested in. We will not be starting from scratch, but rather beginning with the MapRank Search interface already developed for the David Rumsey Collection in the US by Klokan Technologies GmbH and developing from there.

To be included in the portal, old maps need to be:

Already scanned
Geo-referenced: we must at least know the approximate real world coordinates of the corners
Freely, directly and fairly reliably accessible on-line, on the web site of whatever library holds them

So long as these conditions are met, the portal will list maps covering the area the user is interested in, providing hyperlinks which lead directly to online views of the actual maps.

Our application was supported by the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the National Libraries of Scotland and of Wales in the UK; and by the David Rumsey Collection, the Harvard Geospatial Library and the New York Public Library in the US. Because the project is based on existing software, we will be launching the first version of the portal at historic map-focused one-day meetings in New York and London in February 2012.

That first version will probably be limited to the Rumsey Collection, the National Library of Scotland and the Vision of Britain map collection, but during the rest of the project we will add access to our other partner libraries, and hopefully recruit additional partners. Our funding is about improving access to existing digital content, so we cannot help map libraries scan their collections, but we may be able to assist with geo-referencing, and advise on software for making map images viewable on the web. Note that the latter software does not need to have any geo-spatial capabilities, as those will be provided by the portal.

Another major component of the project is about making historical maps not just easier to find online but easier to cite, defining persistent Uniform Resource Identifiers.

We are one of 7 funded projects under Strand C of the JISC Content Call, on Clustering Content. For more information about the funding programme please see the relevant page on the JISC website.

NLS Maps API: historical map of Great Britain for mashups

2010-05-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

With the help of the software developed in our project OldMapsOnline.org has prepared a very interesting historical mapping application, allowing anyone to include selected historical geo-referenced maps of Great Britain in their own websites. Sets of Ordnance Survey mapping relating to Scotland, England and Wales, dating from the 1920s to 1940s, have been seamed together and geo-referenced, then specially prepared for use in external websites.

NLS Maps API: Historical maps of Great Britain for use in mashups

For more information, please view http://geo.nls.uk/maps/api/

The maps have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Licence, allowing free use and adaptation of the mapping, provided it is properly attributed. The maps were scanned and geo-referenced by the National Library of Scotland, and rendered on the Amazon EC2 computer
cluster by Klokan Technologies GmbH, with a software based on a customised version of the MapTiler application.

The maps can be used for many purposes - they can be integrated with other mapping, used for research purposes, used as a backdrop for bespoke markers or mapping data, or used to create other maps (such as OpenStreetMap). The application will also run on many mobile devices, including the iPhone, iPad or Google Android based phones - simply by opening the website http://nls.tileserver.com/.

The historical map API homepage provides simple instructions for how to embed the mapping in websites, and use it with the most popular free web-mapping services, including Google, Bing, and Openlayers.

OldMapsOnline.org project will include this map as one of the reference maps in our Georeferencer.org online service.

More info at http://geo.nls.uk/maps/api/

Meet us at the ICA CartoHeritage Workshop in Vienna!

2010-01-18T05:57:00.000-08:00

The ICA Commission on Digital Technologies in Cartographic Heritage and Vienna University of Technology are organising the 5th International Workshop on Digital Approaches in Cartographic Heritage in Vienna on February 22–24, 2010.

We will give a talk OldMapsOnline.org: IIPImage, JPEG2000 and Georeferencer.org during this workshop.

Please follow direct link to the registration form if you are interested to participate.

We look forward to discuss our project and related topics with the attendees of this workshop!

IIPImage JPEG2000: Free Software for Zoomable High Resolution Online Images!

2010-01-13T05:47:00.001-08:00

Moravian Library and the OldMapsOnline.org project are proud to announce the release of a new version of the open-source IIPImage server software (http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/).

The freely available IIPImage software can be used for stunning online presentations of scanned documents, paintings, maps, books, newspapers, photographs or other high-resolution images on the web directly from JPEG2000 or TIFF files.

The new version allows direct publishing from JPEG2000 images to a wide variety of different client technologies based on AJAX, Adobe Flash or Silverlight. These include popular pan&zoom viewers based on Zoomify or Seadragon technology (including the Seadragon AJAX viewer and the Seadragon iPhone application) as well as it's own AJAX enabled IIPMooViewer. The documents provided by IIPImage can be displayed in any web browser and on a number of platforms - Windows, Mac, Linux or iPhone.

The software is primarily targeted at institutions who operate their own server connected to the Internet and who want to publish large collections of digital images directly from JPEG2000 or
TIFF files.

Institutions who does not have the necessary infrastructure can follow our alternative tutorial at http://help.oldmapsonline.org/publish/ on how to achieve the same using standard web hosting and free software.

IIPImage is a light-weight client-server system for fast and efficient online viewing and zooming of ultra high-resolution images. It is designed to be bandwidth and memory efficient and usable over a slow Internet connection even on gigapixel sized images.
It is available for free, under an open source license (GNU GPL). We recommend installing
the software on a Linux (or other UNIX) server. We have prepared an easy to install binary package for Debian and Ubuntu with step-by-step instructions for installation.

JPEG2000 support has been implemented using the Kakadu library, which provides one of the fastest implementations of the JPEG2000 ISO standard and is redistributable for non-commercial use.

The enhancement of IIPImage was developed by the Moravian Library and the OldMapsOnline.org project with the support of grants from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic.

The Moravian Library (http://www.mzk.cz/), based in Brno, Czech Republic, is a research institution and a legal deposit library. Project OldMapsOnline.org (http://www.oldmapsonline.org/) is a research project of the Moravian Library that aims to develop software to assist in the management, manipulation and visualisation of historical map collections on the web. The project team is designing online tools for publishing, collaborative georeferencing, annotation, 3D visualisation, accuracy analysis and geometadata specification for old maps.

For more information and for the IIPImage JPEG2000 software, see http://help.oldmapsonline.org/jpeg2000/.

Workshop in Scotland (BCS Map Curators' Group)

2009-10-24T02:57:00.000-07:00

OldMapsOnline.org workflow was presented during a Workshop organized by The Map Curators' Group of the British Cartographic Society.
The title of the workshop was "From paper to screen: Putting maps on the web".

Details about this workshop are available online at the BCS website, including a programme with several interesting presentations related to the subject.

The morning session of the second day of the workshop was devoted to a practical demonstration where Christopher Fleet (National Library of Scotland) and Klokan Petr Pridal (Moravian Library Brno, OldMapsOnline.org) used Bartholomew 1912 map of Edinburgh to present a complete old map processing workflow starting from scanning, over online publishing and georeferencing, to the visualization on the web by overlaying of Google Maps and Google Earth.

Here are the slides from the workshop:

From paper to screen: Putting maps on the web

The online map presentations created during the workshop:

Zoomify presentation of the scan of the paper map.
Google Maps overlay generated by MapTiler from the georeferenced image.
OpenLayers viewer generated by MapTiler from the georeferenced image.

You can also download the original files for this map and try the suggested workflow yourself:

The file as it was produced by the scanner: 74400474.tif (!!! big: 200+ MBytes - use right click and "Save as")
The georeferenced image: 74400474-geo.tif (!!! big: 200+ MBytes - use right click and "Save as")

A step by step tutorial for publishing with Zoomify and MapTiler is available on on our website:
http://help.oldmapsonline.org/publish/

Poster at ICHC 2009

2009-07-21T16:36:00.000-07:00

ICHC 2009 - International Conference on the History of Cartography was this year in Copenhagen, Denmark - July 12th - 17th.

Historians and librarians, map curators and people from all around the world who knows each other from discussions at the maphist@, who works at the The History of Cartography Project and who are behind the collections and activities linked from the website http://www.maphistory.info/ had a chance to meet there face to face.

I presented at this conference a poster (PDF) describing our software tools and workflow we are working on, with screenshots of the latest prototypes.
I also made a short demo at the ISCEM meeting (International Society of the Curators of the Early Maps).

This was the first public presentation of the online tools, which are under heavy development now. I also made a report about the development of the open-source image server for JPEG2000 files based on IIPImage, which we are going to publish soon.

ELAG: Workflow for old maps in libraries

2009-06-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

At the European Library Automation Group (ELAG) conference we discussed the comprehensive workflow which we recommend for rare maps publishing in libraries.
The final summarizing presentation is attached to this blog post.

OldMapsOnline.org: ELAG 2009 Workshop Report

Detailed notes and links to software tools and online prototypes are available at our support website: http://help.oldmapsonline.org/.