Petr Přidal awarded Bartholomew Globe by Royal Scottish Geographical Society

Yesterday we held our second conference on Working Digitally with Historical Maps. The first was held at the New York Public Library in February, and saw the original launch of the Old Maps Online web site. This time we were at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, and included the first public demonstration of the new and improved software for the site. Much more about that and the other presentations next time, but for a quick summary of the day take a look at Edina's Go-Geo blog.

One highlight of the day was a short ceremony at which Bruce Gittings, Vice-Chair of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, presented Petr Přidal, founder of Klokan Technologies and principal architect of the Old Maps Online system, with the Bartholomew Globe. Bruce is wearing the suit, and his speech follows.

"Through its publications and awards the Royal Scottish Geographical Society is pleased to acknowledge and promote notable research, development and innovation within the geographical sciences. Amongst these, the Society awards the Bartholomew Globe, which is named in honour of the notable family of Edinburgh cartographers, who worked in Duncan Street just around the corner from the NLS Map Library. This is given in recognition of an exceptional contribution to cartography, mapping and related techniques.

Today we have already heard from someone who has made a very significant and enduring contribution to online mapping, directly enabling the pioneering work undertaken here in the National Library of Scotland, and in the Moravian Library, in relation to making historical mapping available. This was followed by a significant contribution underpinning projects such as Old Maps Online.

This person is Petr Přidal. Hailing from the Czech Republic, where he gained a Masters in Applied Informatics in 2007 and he finalizes PhD in Cartography now, Petr is a software engineer whose career leaped forward through the springboard of the Google Summer of Code in 2008. He has gone on to found his own company in Switzerland - Klokan Technologies - having set himself the mission of empowering people, companies and institutions, to search, publish and enjoy the real value of the maps they own. For those of you who don't know 'Klokan' is his Czech nickname, meaning slightly bizarrely kangaroo. And there is no doubt that his work 'bounced' the traditional field of historical cartography into the 21st century, underpinning many of the projects we are hearing about today.

Petr has been responsible for innovative software tools including GDAL2Tiles, MapTiler (which permits the seamlessly rendering of maps), IIPImage which provides streaming of high-resolution images, geographical search with MapRank and crowd-sourced georeferencing with Georeferencer. He is strongly of the view that software should be free-and-open-source, and this philosophy has enabled the takeup of these valuable solutions in the often poorly-funded library sector.

It is with the greatest of pleasure I would like to present the Bartholomew Globe to Petr Přidal."

Detail from 1917 Parliamentary Boundary Commission map of Edinburgh (from A Vision of Britain through Time)

AHRC Digital Transformations Moot

Last Monday the project attended the AHRC-moot on Digital Transformations, held at the Mermaid Conference Centre in London. Humphrey Southall represented Old Maps Online and presented a joint display entitled 'Old Maps and the Spatial turn'. Alongside Old Maps Online, this exhibition included Kate Jones (University of Portsmouth) who was introducing the new Bomb Sight website/mobile app (another JISC funded project), Kimberly Kowal (British Library and a member of our steering group) who presented the BL Georeferencer project on which they collaborated with Klokan Technologies and Leif Isaksen (University of Southampton) who was presenting the Pelagios project which links together resources about the ancient world via a gazetteer of ancient places and YAMA a historical map annotator. There was also a display about the Georeferencer Metadata Hub from Klokan.

copyright © 2000 Cartography Associates.

The aim of this joint exhibition was to focus attention on projects working to embed historical maps into modern digital scholarship and exploit the significant general interest there is in old maps. The old map example here was published by Edward Stanford of London in 1901 and shows South East London.

For further information about the day, including a downloadable PDF of the programme see the AHRC website: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Research-funding/Themes/Digital-Transformations/Pages/Digital-Transformations-Moot.aspx

Focus on the Collections: The National Library of Scotland

The next in our series of more in-depth posts about particular collections is focused on the National Library of Scotland's map collection.

The first thing to note about this library is that it has the largest selection of on-line digital maps in the UK with over 44,000 accessible high-resolution images within an online map library in the "Digital resources" section of their institutional website. Of course this is only a small proportion in terms of their total collection of paper maps, but none-the-less this quantity of digital images is in itself a substantial achievement in the digital archives world and identifies the National Library of Scotland as a leading-light in this digital community. The majority of the collection is understandably focussed on Scotland, although there are maps covering the whole of Great Britain included as well.

(c) National Library of Scotland

Within the Library catalogue the maps are grouped by their type and date and are currently divided into those that are georeferenced and those that are not. The maps accessible via Old Maps Online range in date from the early nineteenth Century through into the twentieth Century and all have co-ordinates associated with them. This example is an excerpt from a map entitled 'Lanarkshire, Sheet VI' which  was published in 1865 and shows a much smaller Glasgow than currently exists, but at the same time it also indicates that central areas in the city have been fairly densely populated for over 150 years.

The Library offers the user the option to purchase digital images or printouts of its online maps from them, something many users appreciate. More than this though this library offers the user different ways in which they can browse and access their maps through a range of cutting-edge map technologies. These include a zoomable maps and gazetteer viewer, KlokanTechnologies Georeferencer software allowing users to help add co-ordinates to yet more maps (more on this in the British Library post), a historical maps API which allows users to incorporate material from the Library into their own websites, overlay technology which lets users place old maps on top of new ones, a project which provides mapping tools for historians and of course they also participate in our Old Maps Online project. This extensive repertoire of software applications highlights the commitment of the National Library of Scotland to making their map material available to users in new and interesting ways.

With thanks to Chris Fleet, Senior Map Curator at the 
National Library of Scotland, for his assistance with this post

Old Maps Online - so what?

JISC, who funded Old Maps Online, have requested that we review the success of our project, and how it can be sustained. Here we explore the ways our project has added value.

First and foremost we think we have achieved what we set out to do: creating an online search facility which is easy to use, is full of useful content and links to a wide variety of host institutions. There are a number of different ways we consider the project unique in its success;

• We have created and implemented new MapRank Search software suitable for hosting material from a myriad of institutions
• We have persuaded a range of different digital map libraries from around the world to participate
• We have included maps covering all parts of the whole world
• We have helped some UK libraries add geographical metadata to their digital map images
• We have encouraged all libraries holding maps to think about their metadata in a geographical context
• We have provided a single entry point for searching maps of the same geographical location without the need to know which library holds the actual map
• We have clustered metadata for use in a new way

Of course some of our success is hard to quantify precisely because we are providing an open-access resource. We can look at web usage analysis and count numbers using the website. We can report the stir of positive interest we created when we launched back in February on social networking sites such as Twitter. We can hypothesize that the involvement of so many different host institutions is because we are offering a service which is both open-access for users and free to participate for contributors.

However, we feel that even more than that we have started to influence how libraries think about their geographical holdings. Institutions are beginning to consider how geographical content within their collections can best be made findable and searchable. They are raising questions about the best way to make this content available to their users. Many more institutions have contacted us than are currently contributing saying they would have liked to participate, but that their material as yet does not have a geographical element to its metadata and unfortunately for both them and us it will not be added in time to be included before the end of the current funding for Old Maps Online.

We have proposed a concept and proved it works -- but  this is just one way in which enriched metadata can be used in new ways to simplify online searching.

New crowd-sourced Geo-referencer Project

As many of you will know last Spring the British Library used Klokan Technologies' Georeferencer software to run a very successful project to georeference some of their historical map collection. It completed so quickly we were able to include their maps in the official launch of Old Maps Online even though we hadn't originally planned to do so. Now the British Library has scanned a new set of historical maps and are asking for the help of the public give these maps coordinates too.

They do not have the resources to do the georeferencing internally themselves, so using a customised version of Georeferencer was a good solution for them. They are hoping that this round of crowd-sourcing will be just as successful as the last set and allow them to add to the usability and findability of their maps, including through our website Old Maps Online. If you can help please spread the word or have a go yourself by visiting their site: http://www.bl.uk/maps/

Focus on the collections: A Vision of Britain through Time

We thought we'd like to run a series of blog posts introducing some of the highlights in particular collections that we include in Old Maps Online as we run up to the end of the project funding and receive our final new contributions.

We are starting at home with the map collection from A Vision of Britain through Time. The collection mainly covers Great Britain, although there are a few smaller scale European maps as well. Within the map library the maps are grouped together by their type, which are divided into topographic, boundary and land use, and the collection ranges in date from the early nineteenth Century through to the mid twentieth Century. Particularly points of interest within this map collection include;

• Maps from the first Land Utilisation Survey. Directed by Sir L. Dudley Stamp during the 1930s this survey involved school children going out and surveying their local areas, and their results were then compiled onto 1 inch maps by professional cartographers. When the maps went live on A Vision of Britain through Time it was the first time the whole series for Great Britain had been published (upland Scotland previously was only available as watercolour proofs and had never been printed).
• Maps from the Boundary Commission reports of 1832 onwards. The early maps were created completely separately from the national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, because their mapping was not available to the Boundary Commissioners. These maps therefore present an interesting contemporary parallel to the early Ordnance Survey mapping. They reflect different approaches to mapping, with the Ordnance Survey attempting completely coverage whilst the Boundary Commission mapped only areas it needed to because there were boundary changes.
• Ordnance Survey Maps from the early nineteenth century, which have hand-drawn colour boundaries of parishes and Poor Law Unions overlaid on top of a first series black and white base map. We believe this series to be unique, but it is incomplete, containing only 80 maps which cover the southern part of the country. The inset example is from one of the earliest sheets shows a corner of Oxfordshire on the Banbury sheet which is dated 1803.

The map library in A Vision of Britain through time is entirely digital. The scanned images were brought together for the web site, but the original paper maps are located in several different map libraries. A download facility from A Vision of Britain through Time is available, but has to be limited to UK further and higher education institutions to abide by copyright laws and to limit server load. However, all the maps in A Vision of Britain through Time are available for everyone to view as entire map sheets, and they are all searchable through Old Maps Online.

Google think we are cool ...

Last week Vaclav Klusak from our team attended the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco, and was able to demonstrate Old Maps Online there.

Even better, two members of the Google Maps engineering team used Old Maps Online as their first non-in-house example of how best to use the optional styling facilities in the Google Maps API to suit a particular site. Jonah Jones, the design lead for Google Maps, said:

Old Maps Online let you find historical maps in libraries around the world, and they have got a map that really feels historical and old. They have got a faded color palate, they have got this cool kind of grain effect that you see over the top.

You can see their presentation online, and he makes this comment a minute in:

https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/gooio2012/901

However, you can't please everybody. One user recently mailed us to say:

All I am getting is a very faint background with faint outlines of a main road and a river. What am I not doing/doing wrong? ... I know it’s free but I’ve accessed many other free sites and this is the most frustrating website I have ever had the misfortune to come across.

Looks like he is unhappy about exactly the styling the Google Maps team think is cool! We do wonder if he needs to adjust his display.

This blog has been getting visually rather boring, so from now on we will try to include maps of the places we do presentations. Here, for example, is part of a 1908 maps in the David Rumsey collection showing the relative intensity of the San Francisco earthquake. The full map is here.

New article published about Old Maps Online -- free and online

An article about Old Maps Online, by Humphrey Southall and Petr Pridal, has just been published in the open access journal e-Perimetron. You can read it from here:

http://www.e-perimetron.org/Vol_7_2/Vol7_2.htm

It is based on the presentation we gave at the International Cartographic Association meeting in Barcelona back in April. The article is not so much about the technology behind the portal as about our wider aims, and how we are working with map libraries to achieve them.

World History Association Conference 2012

Downtown Albuquerque 1880

Last week Humphrey attended the World History Association conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the United States. It took place on the 27th to the 30th of June and had two themes “Frontiers and Borders in World History" and "Indigenous Peoples in World History”. This meeting acts as an opportunity for the discussion of history across regional, cultural and political boundaries by an international community.

On the Saturday morning Humphrey presented a paper entitled "Finding and Referencing Old Maps Online" in a session about "Creating and Displaying World Historical Data". For more details of the conference please see here.