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.

Google I/O conference 2012

June 27th-29th 2012 saw the Google I/O conference take place in the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Following on from the potal's appearance on the Google Developers showcase listing of sites they like (as we reported in May), the Old Maps Online team were invited to present the portal at this event.

The conference which is organised by Google to highlight new innovations and products to developers will show the portal on slides as an example of best practice with styled maps. Vaclav Klusak of Klokan Technologies GmbH represented the project at this prestigious event.

OpenLayers OL3 Sprint event

This week Petr is one of seven people working together on a major new version of OpenLayers envisioned as having two options, one for img/SVG/VML/Canvas files and another for WebGL (Canvas 3D) which would allow client side editing and being able to see things in perspective. They are discussing architecture, the library and a new API.

For more details of the discussions take a look at the project blog, whilst progress will be reported here: https://github.com/openlayers/ol3