General project update May 2012

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

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:

• 18th Conference of the LIBER Groupe des Cartothécaires | Maps Expert Group Barcelona, Spain 17-18 April 2012
• 7th Workshop Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage, Barcelona, 19-20 April 2012

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

1. Improvements to the crowdsourced georeferencing using Georeferencer, and its implementation in the British Library. (presentation)
2. 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.
3. Open-Source technologies for delivering historical maps online
4. 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

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