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.