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.

ELAG: Workflow for old maps in libraries

At the European Library Automation Group (ELAG) conference we discussed the comprehensive workflow which we recommend for rare maps publishing in libraries.
The final summarizing presentation is attached to this blog post.

OldMapsOnline.org: ELAG 2009 Workshop Report

Detailed notes and links to software tools and online prototypes are available at our support website: http://help.oldmapsonline.org/.

OldMapsOnline Project Started

We are pleased to announce a start of the OldMapsOnline project! We aim to devolop freely available/open source tool chain and methodology which will allow anyone (namely libraries, archives and museums) to publish scanned old maps in both GIS and user friendly, standards based way.

The system will:

• provide online georeferencing tool and online rectifier for large digitised maps which will generate geo-metadata for cataloguing the maps, search purposes as well as presentation and overlay of maps
  
• suggest or develop software tools useful for publishing huge collections of scanned old maps
  
• facilitate search for digitised maps and graphics linked to a certain geographic location
  
• provide user friendly search interface using geographic and temporal information (marking an area on a map, timeline, map ranking)
  
• be available in English and Czech and it will be possible to translate it into other languages.
  

We also plan to contribute to existing open source projects such as OpenLayers, MapServer, GDAL and IIPImage.

The four-year project (2008-2011) is backed by the Moravian Library in Brno with financial support from the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic as a R&D project# DC08P02OUK006.

Have a look at online video from presentation of prototypes of our tools to get more information.