forwarded by Angie

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Seeking digitised map collections for Old Maps Online and the
PastPlace project
Date: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:03:05 +0100
From: Humphrey Southall <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: A forum for issues related to map & spatial data librarianship
              <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]

It always feels slight silly making public appeals that depend on
particular grant applications succeeding, but I sent a similar e-mail to
this list two years ago when I was working on the proposal to JISC for
the Old Maps Online (OMO) project, and that worked out well:

   http://www.oldmapsonline.org

This time, we are working on an application to the Arts and Humanities
Research Council which must be submitted two weeks from today. Pretty
much everyone involved in OMO is involved in this.

(1) If this is funded, we would certainly be doing another round of work
on Old Maps Online, and would be keen to include additional digital map
collections, or more maps from the collections already there. To be
included, maps must have been scanned and the resulting images must be
freely and directly available online at stable web addresses; "freely
and directly" means there cannot be any requirement for payment,
passwords or form-filling before viewing the map (but controls on
downloads are OK). We also need basic geo-referencing: the real-world
coordinates of the corners of the map; but there is very definitely no
need for the maps to be held in specialised GIS systems, we expect them
to be in image serving systems like Zoomify or IIPImage. (NB we are
hoping to do this even if the new project is not funded; everyone
involved in OMO is still in post).

(2) FOR THE RIGHT MAPS WE WILL GO SIGNIFICANTLY FURTHER: WE WILL FUND
THE GEO-REFERENCING, using Klokan Technologies' Georeferencer
crowd-sourcing system, and we may be able to provide some limited
support for getting existing images into a public online system (but we
are not going to buy image server systems, and we cannot fund the actual
scanning). This might be about maps you have already scanned, or maps
you will be scanning between now and, at latest, the end of 2014.

(3) Again for the right maps, IF PEOPLE CANNOT RUN THEIR OWN IMAGE
SERVERS WE ARE INTERESTED IN GATHERING TOGETHER EXISTING SCANS INTO OUR
OWN COLLECTION AT PORTSMOUTH. Here we would be basically extending the
existing map library within the web site A Vision of Britain through
Time, as it is now running on a new server with a lot of free space, but
we would certainly be acknowledging contributors, and trying to visually
identify groups of contributed maps as collections distinct from our
own. Our guess is that not many libraries will want to do this, but you
may know of private collectors or research projects who have scans they
want to put online, and they can't do it themselves.

    http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/maps

THE "RIGHT MAPS"

This new project is not just about historical maps, it is about
gazetteers, and in particular about making an existing global gazetteer
"historical" by adding the historical names of the places as they appear
on old maps. If this goes ahead it would be effectively twinned with
another project which has just been funded in which experts will be
gathering just such "place annotations" from very early (pre-1492) maps
and other "geospatial documents" (sorry to be a little vague, but that
is someone else's announcement to make). Each of these "annotations"
will record the map on which the place appears, the location within an
image of the map, the ID of the place as already defined in the master
gazetteer, a transcription of the name as it appears on the map, and who
made the annotation. The master global gazetteer will come from either
Geonames or Wikidata, which is a new resource linked to Wikipedia.

Our proposed project would create annotations of exactly the same form,
but they would be created from a subset of the maps for which we hold
information in Old Maps Online, and they would be created by "community
research", i.e. a kind of crowd-sourcing (we would be using the eyeballs
of the crowd, not its wisdom). One reason why this would be limited to a
subset of the OMO maps is that we need new permissions from libraries to
include their maps in this project, as it will place additional loads on
their image servers, but another reason is that large scale maps are of
limited relevance, as most of the features on them will be streets,
farmsteads, hillocks etc which are not in the master gazetteer; and
twentieth century maps will not provide interesting variant names. More
broadly, the overall project is about tracing the growth of geographical
knowledge by recording what places appear on maps from different dates,
and that loses most of its interest somewhere in the late 19th century.

In other words, the "right maps" are relatively small scale maps from
the mid-19th century and earlier; maps at approximately one mile to the
inch are probably worth including in the system, but "county maps" would
be more useful. Given the periods we are interested in, they are not
going to be that topographically accurate, and scale may be a bit
imprecise; but the place names need to be readable without a lot of
linguistic or palaeographic expertise. We are especially keen to include
maps of areas outside Britain, but offer (2) above has to be limited to
UK libraries.

We have already identified one very useful collection which a library
will be scanning in the next 12 months, where we would be able to assist
in getting them online. It would be great to hear of a few more
(preferably by the end of next week -- sorry).

NB although in a sense this is about using maps to build a gazetteer, in
another sense it is about building a place name index to the map
collections: the planned PastPlace gazetteer would provide links to maps
on library sites in a very similar way to Old Maps Online, but linking
to maps that don't just COVER a place's location but also definitely
SHOW the place; it will let users view the maps to see how the place has
changed over time.

Humphrey Southall

Reader in Geography/
Director, GB Historical GIS
University of Portsmouth
Geography Dept, Buckingham Bldg,
Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE, UK
www.gbhgis.org & www.visionofbritain.org.uk