Edinburgh Conference: Working Digitally with Historical Maps

Firstly we'd like to wish all our readers a Happy New Year. Secondly below you will find a summary of the proceedings of the one day conference organised by the Old Maps Online team which was held at the end of 2012.

In December we journeyed north to Edinburgh to hold our second conference on Working Digitally with Historical Maps at the National Library of Scotland. People from a variety of different backgrounds attended, ranging from those already working on innovative ways to use digital historical maps, through those who have digital maps and wanted inspiration on what they could do with them to those just beginning to have an interest who wanted to see what is currently available.

The day was broken in gently at 10am with coffee and an introductory welcome. This was followed by Petr Pridal giving the key note presentation detailing the improved functionality and searching and much extended content of our own Old Maps Online site (we'll let you know when these changes have actually gone live).

Following that Session 1 looked at using technology to map

Detail from Nairn and Elgin, W. Johnson, 1832.
(c) Cartography Associates

history. It started with two staff from the National Library of Scotland, Chris Fleet who detailed the improvements made to their online mapping and catalogue which make it even easier to use and search their collection, whilst Alice Heywood showed us a Moray community project where local people recorded their views on interesting places around Elgin available to visitors through a mobile app. Another mobile app was described by Chris Speed from the Edinburgh College of Art which allows users to download historical maps to compare with their modern day location through the "blue dot" location marker. Peter Munro finished off the first session by describing how the Borders Family History Society have been digitising historical personal records and then mapping addresses from them to show sometimes surprising distribution results of those receiving poor relief. Just before we stopped for lunch there was the presentation of the Bartholomew Globe to Petr Pridal by Bruce Gittings of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, you can read more details about this in our last blog post.

Detail from Scotland SE, E. Stanford , 1901.
 (c) Cartography Associates

Session 2 introduced the concept of visualising spaces, places and routes between them. Richard Rodger of the University of Edinburgh described and demonstrated the function of the tools created as part of the visualising urban geographies project which help those studying history understand the spatial element. Bruce Gittings (also University of Edinburgh) then presented the work of one of his Msc students, Michal Michalski, which combined a range of different data to depict a multi-disciplinary view of historical Perth. Then came two presentations about mapping route ways. David Simpson spoke about his work on digitising the roads drawn on maps of the highlands created by William Roy as a mid eighteenth century Military Survey of Scotland and their accuracy. Neil Ramsay followed with a presentation about mapping paths from old maps onto modern maps online and encouraging people to go out and explore and enjoy these paths.  The final presentation in this session saw Andrew Janes of The National Archives talking about the newly launched BombSight website, another JISC funded project, which maps the locations of bombs dropped in London during part of the Blitz and will feature a mobile app to link this to your location on the ground. Humphrey Southall then demonstrated the website's functionality.

Name detail on the Eye Peninsula of Lewis
in the Outer Hebrides from the OS of
Scotland, Popular Edition, Stornoway, 1925,
 from A Vision of Britain through Time

After a fortifying tea and biscuit break we entered the third and final session focused on using place-names and gazetteers. Ashley Beamer (Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland) spoke about ScotlandsPlaces, their website which brings together place-based datasets from three different partners and which is currently being expanded. Jake King from Ainmean Aite na h-Alba (also known as 'Gaelic Place-Names of Scotland' if, like me, you don't speak Gaelic) spoke about work to extract changing historical place-names from old maps and ways of using a modern map to facilitate access to those historical maps. Another dual presentation by Kirsty Stewart from the University of Edinburgh Library and Neil Mayo from Edina followed as they spoke about a project to digitise the Alexander Carmichael archive and collection and the current phrase to link items within them to places. Paul Ell presented the final paper of the day on the plans of the Digital Exposure of English Place-Names project (also JISC funded) to produce a digital gazetteer using data on variant place names collected by the Survey of English Place Names over the past 80 years.  We then ended the day with a quick thank-you to everyone, especially the speakers. Although we didn't get chance to have a wrap-up discussion as intended, there were many interesting points raised in the questions and comments following each presentation which left us all with plenty to think about.

We'd like to say a big thank-you to everyone for taking the time to come to the conference, as despite being held in the run up to Christmas it was well attended.  Everyone I spoke to during and after the day seemed to enjoy it. We have created a webpage about the conference, it gives the names of the speakers, titles, abstracts and website addresses for all papers plus downloadable PDF copies of both the programme and abstracts.

There is now also a similar page giving information about the previous Working Digitally with Historical Maps conference held in February 2012 at the New York Public Library which launched the initial Old Maps Online website, see here.

Old Maps Online - so what?

JISC, who funded Old Maps Online, have requested that we review the success of our project, and how it can be sustained. Here we explore the ways our project has added value.

First and foremost we think we have achieved what we set out to do: creating an online search facility which is easy to use, is full of useful content and links to a wide variety of host institutions. There are a number of different ways we consider the project unique in its success;

• We have created and implemented new MapRank Search software suitable for hosting material from a myriad of institutions
• We have persuaded a range of different digital map libraries from around the world to participate
• We have included maps covering all parts of the whole world
• We have helped some UK libraries add geographical metadata to their digital map images
• We have encouraged all libraries holding maps to think about their metadata in a geographical context
• We have provided a single entry point for searching maps of the same geographical location without the need to know which library holds the actual map
• We have clustered metadata for use in a new way

Of course some of our success is hard to quantify precisely because we are providing an open-access resource. We can look at web usage analysis and count numbers using the website. We can report the stir of positive interest we created when we launched back in February on social networking sites such as Twitter. We can hypothesize that the involvement of so many different host institutions is because we are offering a service which is both open-access for users and free to participate for contributors.

However, we feel that even more than that we have started to influence how libraries think about their geographical holdings. Institutions are beginning to consider how geographical content within their collections can best be made findable and searchable. They are raising questions about the best way to make this content available to their users. Many more institutions have contacted us than are currently contributing saying they would have liked to participate, but that their material as yet does not have a geographical element to its metadata and unfortunately for both them and us it will not be added in time to be included before the end of the current funding for Old Maps Online.

We have proposed a concept and proved it works -- but  this is just one way in which enriched metadata can be used in new ways to simplify online searching.

Presenting at Geoforum: Old Maps Online and Historic Digimap

On Wednesday June 20th we exhibited Old Maps Online at EDINA's annual Geoforum event, held this year at the National Railway Museum in York, and gave a short presentation.

Geoforum is mostly about publicising EDINA's own geospatial services, of which Digimap is probably the most heavily used, including Historic Digimap. Enhancements to Digimap were announced, and another of the short presentations was from Landmark Information, who supply the content for Historic Digimap.

Like Old Maps Online, Digimap Historic is also funded by JISC, so why have two separate services?

• To most users of Old Maps Online, there is a very obvious answer: they are not staff or students at a UK university, so they have no access to Historic Digimap. However, in a real sense our being an open access site is a problem for us: given that every penny of our funding comes from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, surely there are better things they can spend money on that a web site providing Americans with easier access to American map libraries? One answer is that because Old Maps Online does not hold any maps, only information about how to find maps, it runs on the most basic server our university can supply us with, so it would not be any cheaper to run even if we limited access to it. Further, people in UK universities are not interested only in the UK, and want access to as many maps as possible; but to get the assistance we need from librarians outside the UK universities we need to be seen to be improving access for their user communities as well -- so everybody wins! (still, we hope the rest of the world shows some gratitude to the UK tax payers ...)
• Historic Digimap provides access only to old Ordnance Survey maps digitised by Landmark Information, at scales of 1:10,560 (six inches to one mile) and more detailed, while most of the maps accessible via Old Maps Online are much less detailed. A user on Presurfer, a genealogical blog, said about Old Maps Online "Not a bad resource, but the range of maps is fairly narrow and the of fairly poor scale. The best scale they offer for my area (the UK) seems to be 1 inch to the mile (1:63,360). http://www.old-maps.co.uk [Landmark's direct sales site] offers a wider range of mapping for more dates on a much better scale. ... If you're interested in looking into the past of an area you really need large scale maps." If you zoom in hard within Old Maps Online on anywhere in Scotland, or a few other places, you will find we can and do provide access to exactly the kind of maps "Gareth" wants. However, we don't agree that larger scale is simply better: six inch maps are good for showing you your ancestor's house, but useless for giving you a sense of where their home town or village was, and absurd for tracing the progress of a war.
• Given that Old Maps Online is not a map library but a search portal, the real comparison should be not with Historic Digimap but with EDINA's GoGeo geospatial discovery service. When Old Maps Online was first discussed, one idea was to develop it as an extension to GoGeo. However, we concluded that GoGeo was too "GIS-sy" for our purposes and it was better to base the project on MapRank Search, Klokan Technologies existing software for map libraries. Another interesting comparison, in fact, is between Old Maps Online and OpenGeoportal, software developed by a consortium of US research libraries which unlike GoGeo does provide access to old maps as well as to more conventional geospatial datasets. OpenGeoportal-based systems can be access here, for example, and my sense is that people with GIS training will prefer it to Old Maps Online, because of the extra functionality, but most of the planet will find it too complex. NB most of the historical maps in OpenGeoportal come from the Harvard collection, and we will be adding that collection in our next release, so everyone will be able to compare the two styles of search interface.

Different strokes for different folks ...