Old Maps Online Launched

Today sees the official UK launch of the new website associated with this blog Old Maps Online. Created in collaboration between Klokan Technologies GmbH based in Switzerland and the Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at the University of Portsmouth funded by JISC as part of their Content Programme for 2011-13 it offers a new way to search digitised historical maps.

Described by its creators as 'like google for old maps' it allows the user to zoom and pan on a world map, or type in a place name and instantly get a listing of maps available that most closely match the place and scale of map visible in the map viewer. Users can also narrow their search by date using a time slider bar. The default setting will locate the map viewer on the physical location of the user. As the user zooms in or pans the map listing is simultaneously updated. The map listing identifies maps by their name, publication information and presents a thumbnail image. Once the user finds a map they wish to investigate more closely, clicking on the map details in the listing will bring up the meta-data record for the individual map. From there the user can click through to immediately see a full-sized online image of the historical map at its host institution. There is no requirement for passwords, subscription or download to view the image.

This innovative search engine allows users to search through map catelogues across a number of institutions in a geographical way. Users will no longer have to spend time identifying which institution might hold the maps they want to view, as for the first time the holdings of individual map libraries are presented together in a single interface. Initial map holdings come from the David Rumsey Map Collection, The National Library of Scotland, The British Library, the Moravian Library and the map collection of A Vision of Britain through Time and more will be added over the coming months. Anybody interested in contributing maps from their own collection should see the contribution page of the website for further details.

Keynote by David Rumsey, Humphrey Southall and Petr Pridal
announcing the OldMapsOnline search engine in NYPL. 

The site was launched at the New York Public Library during a special workshop 'Working digitally with Historical Maps' which was part the Association of Amercian Geographers' conference and at the Gerald Aylmer Seminar 2012 'Locating the Past' held today at Chancellor's hall in Senate House, which is part of the University of London.

http://www.oldmapsonline.org

Update: The presentation from the launch in New York Public Library is available on SlideShare.

Old Maps Online: New York Public Library Announcement

View more presentations from Petr Pridal

Course: Working Digitally with Historical Maps and Geographical Information -- Portsmouth, June 2012

The Great Britain Historical GIS Team and the University of Portsmouth are running a one-week hands-on introduction to historical GIS methods on June 18th-22nd, 2012.

It is aimed at anyone wanting to create a digital resource from sources which are both historical and geographical – most obviously old maps, but also historical census information or geographically rich text. You may be planning on building a “historical GIS” or simply a web site with many maps – one aim is to help you decide the most appropriate final result for your particular sources and goals:

• We will equip you to do a small project in historical GIS or map-based digitization; or to plan and manage a larger project – so we include both hands-on training with GIS software, and sessions on source selection, project planning, copyright and budgeting.
• Hands-on training emphasizes Quantum GIS, a capable free open-source alternative to the commercial GIS software that historians and ‘memory institutions’ cannot afford, but most skills will be transferable to other programs.
• Quantum excels in accessing standards-based on-line GIS services, such as web map servers providing base maps. We will show you how to avoid starting from scratch, by accessing new online services and download facilities within the GB Historical GIS.
• Members of the GB Historical GIS team will teach core modules, but the course also features case studies presented by other members of Portsmouth Geography, and speakers from the Ordnance Survey, British Library and the National Archives.
• Hands-on sessions will have a maximum of ten attendees per leader.
• Our campus adjoins Portsmouth’s historic dockyard, home of the Royal Navy for five hundred years. The course includes a visit to the Admiralty Map Library, one of the world’s great historical map libraries but open to visitors only by special arrangement, and a dinner at the Royal Naval Club.
• Portsmouth is an hour and a half from London by train, and easily reached from London Heathrow, London Gatwick and Southampton airports. Car parking can be arranged.

Portsmouth Geography is the base for the Great Britain Historical GIS project and several other major online resources. Uniquely, we have not just twenty years experience in historical GIS, but over ten years of experience in employing Geographical Information Systems technology in standards-based digitization projects, with funding from the UK National Lottery, the Joint Information Systems Committee and the European Union.

Course fee: £849, including lunches, refreshments and the Working Digitally dinner. Overnight accommodation for four to six nights is available for £37.50 per night (bed and breakfast). For more details and to register, visit:

             http://www.port.ac.uk/workingdigitally

The British Library: Georeferencer Pilot

The British Library announced a pilot project where general public is asked to help to georeference some of the treasures of British mapping. With the help of the online visitors the maps are for the first time overlayed on top of 3D terrain in Google Earth.
The scanned maps become also searchable by their geographic location, because the metadata in a library catalog are enriched with the numerical coordinates (formatted as MARC 034 or DCMI Box) - after review by librarians.

Would you like to try this tool and help British Library to georeference some of the maps? The process is very simple and documented in this video:

You can get assigned a random map by clicking on a button "Fix the location of a map" displayed at http://maps.bl.uk/ or you can choose a map of your own preference in the BL Online Gallery.

After one day almost 300 maps were georeferenced by the volunteers! It seems to be a successful example of crowdsourcing in libraries.

The pilot is powered by the Georeferencer technology, which can be easily applied on the online maps in other libraries and archives too.

The British Library is a partner in our project, and therefore these maps will be in a near future added to the OldMapsOnline.org federated map search engine allowing search by location and time.

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.