Impact video now available

As part of the Jisc funding requirements the Old Maps Online team had to produce a video report on the impacts of the website. As the site launched early on in the life of the project there was plenty of material for inclusion in the video and lots of people willing to talk about why they like the site.


The filming was done on location at the one-day conference, Working Digitally with Historical Maps, that we organised in Edinburgh in December 2013 and we are grateful to the National Library of Scotland for allowing this. The video has been uploaded onto and is available to view on the new "Impacts" page on the website.

Online reviews of Old Maps Online

After nearly a whole year of Old Maps Online being live we thought we'd do a quick review of blog comments mentioning the site which have been posted since the initial flurry of interest following the launch. Below are a selection of what we found people have said about actually using the site.

1st March 2012, Brownhillsbob's Brownhills Blog
"Here’s a great one... It’s a new site for old maps – it’s got lots of great material, including Ordnance Survey popular and inter-war editions, and the resolution and working area are great too, often a bit of a limitation on such services. Best of all, it’s absolutely free of charge to use."

30th March 2012, Latest Web Crunch
"The 3 Best Places To Find Free Historical Maps Online: [1] Old Maps Online. This website has been recently designed. If you want to search for any information related to maps, check out this website. It combines map data with an excellent technology and offers brilliant results."

9th April 2012, About.com Genealogy
"This mapping site is really neat, serving as an easy-to-use searchable gateway to historical maps hosted online by repositories around the world. Search by place-name or by clicking in the map window to bring up a list of available historical maps for that area, and then narrow further by date if needed. The search results take you directly to the map image on the website of the host institution."

13th August 2012, The Cambridge Room
"For those of you who love historical maps, there is a new database called Old Maps Online, that allows free access to maps in libraries around the world. Described by its creators as like Google for old maps, Old Maps Online is a central repository to a vast collection of maps across the globe."

23rd September 2012, Genealogy's Star
"If you want to see more of what is available, then you should take a look at Old Maps Online. This site allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search."

Detail of Golden Gate Park from The
"Chevalier" ... Map of San Francisco
by A. Chevalier, 1911 (c) Cartography
Associates

27th November 2012, Genealogy & Family History Stack Exchange

"The David Rumsey Map Collection has a whole bunch of historical maps. Using the Old Maps Online index, which I searched for maps of SF, 1910-1915, I found this "Chevalier" map from 1911. … The nice thing about the Old Maps Online index is that you can restrict by date as  well as by location. It seems better than the built-in search and browsing feature on the David Rumsey site; when I had searched 

there initially, I didn't see anything immediately promising."

6th December 2012, Andrew Zolnai Blog

"Maps are forever... or they are Man's best friend. I'm a big fan of the British Library ... - bl.uk has an amazing array of old maps, which they just finished georeferencing through a significant effort in crowd-sourcing … These maps are now linked to Old Maps Online of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project at University of Portsmouth UK. And being an amateur medievalist* myself, I set the time slider atop the page to between 1000 and 1725, and presto! up comes a 1610 map of "Cambridgshire..."

7th December 2012, Clark Library Blog
"Because it pools the resources of many of the world’s premiere map collections, a visit to the Old Maps Online portal is like taking a trip to many libraries at once, all with a few clicks of a mouse. It may be the place to turn for that hard-to-find map you’re searching for."

Vienna detail from 'Viennense Territorium
ob Res Bellicas inter Christianos et Turcas
Nuperrime E...' by Nicolaum Visscher,
[1685-1700] from the Moravian Library 

10th January 2013, Border Telegraph 

(by Peter Munro, one of our speakers in Edinburgh) 

"The website provides an easy to use method of finding places and 

even streets around the world without having to know the name of 

the map, the name of the cartographer and the name of the library 

that holds the map. The maps can also be searched in foreign 

languages and that's useful for us in accessing foreign maps. I've 

managed to find streets and places in Romania and Austria on old 

maps that aren't mentioned on current maps and that living people 

hadn't heard of."

The good news is that people are still discovering us, liking our site and, perhaps most importantly, finding maps they want to see. With the impending addition of a number of new map collections which will increase the choice of maps we link to we can reasonably hope this trend will continue.

AHRC Digital Transformations Moot

Last Monday the project attended the AHRC-moot on Digital Transformations, held at the Mermaid Conference Centre in London. Humphrey Southall represented Old Maps Online and presented a joint display entitled 'Old Maps and the Spatial turn'. Alongside Old Maps Online, this exhibition included Kate Jones (University of Portsmouth) who was introducing the new Bomb Sight website/mobile app (another JISC funded project), Kimberly Kowal (British Library and a member of our steering group) who presented the BL Georeferencer project on which they collaborated with Klokan Technologies and Leif Isaksen (University of Southampton) who was presenting the Pelagios project which links together resources about the ancient world via a gazetteer of ancient places and YAMA a historical map annotator. There was also a display about the Georeferencer Metadata Hub from Klokan.

copyright © 2000 Cartography Associates.

The aim of this joint exhibition was to focus attention on projects working to embed historical maps into modern digital scholarship and exploit the significant general interest there is in old maps. The old map example here was published by Edward Stanford of London in 1901 and shows South East London.

For further information about the day, including a downloadable PDF of the programme see the AHRC website: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/Funding-Opportunities/Research-funding/Themes/Digital-Transformations/Pages/Digital-Transformations-Moot.aspx

Publicising Old Maps Online

Since the launch review post published a month ago, we have been continuing to demonstrate and publicise the existence of the website to a variety of audiences at every opportunity. On Thursday 22nd March Humphrey and Paula ran a session specifically about Old Maps Online at the UK Archives Discovery Forum 2012 held at The National Archives in Kew, London. The session was popular and those attending were very interested and complimentary about the website. Kimberly Kowal from the project's steering group also presented on the British Library's crowd sourcing project. This day was aimed at archivists involved in promoting working together to open up data access.

University of Glasgow

April 11th-16th saw many flyers being distributed and Humphrey and Paula demonstrating the web site in the main exhibition hall of the European Social Science History Conference held at the University of Glasgow. The conference attracts a large number of scholars interested in explaining historical phenomena using social science methodologies.

This week Humphrey and Petr will both be in Barcelona to present papers on the project at two events. Firstly at the 18th Conference of the LIBER Groupe des Cartothécaires - Maps Expert Group 'Map libraries in a changing world' on the 17-18th April. Humphrey will present 'Embedding historical maps in the practices of historical GIS and Geosemantics: From URLs to URls' whilst a member of the project steering group, Christopher Fleet from the National Library of Scotland, will present with Petr on 'Open source technologies for delivering historical maps online - case studies at the National Library of Scotland'.


For the remainder of this week, Humphrey and Petr will attend the 7th International ICA workshop 'Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage' where they will jointly present 'Old Maps Online: Enabling global access to historical mapping' during the first 'Map Libraries, Collections, Archives' session. During the second of these sessions Humphrey will act as co-chair and Petr will present a paper with Christopher Fleet on 'Opening historical maps for community mash-ups - a case study of the NLS Historical Maps API '. Petr will also present with Kimberly Kowal on 'Improvements to crowdsourced georeferencing using Georeferencer, and its implementation at the British Library' during the 'Georeferencing, Map Content' session and he will chair the session entitled 'Map Content, Territories, Urban cases'.