Progress towards Old Maps Online launch - 2

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)

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)

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

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)

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

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

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/