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.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
LIBER Groupe des Cartothécaires & ICA Workshop in Barcelona
This year Barcelona played host to librarians and researchers from 24 different countries as they met to present their results and ongoing projects working with old maps.
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| ICA & LIBER meeting: Petr Pridal and Humphrey Southall |
- Improvements to the crowdsourced georeferencing using Georeferencer, and its implementation in the British Library. (presentation)
- Historical Maps API for developers of Google Maps API mashups and mobile applications from out-of-copyright old maps of Great Britain - released in co-operation with National Library of Scotland.
- Open-Source technologies for delivering historical maps online
- And of course the presentation of the OldMapsOnline project addressing the map curator community.
We are looking forward to announcing some new map collections joining the OldMapsOnline search portal soon.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Showcased on Google Developers web pages
It seems Google keep tabs on what developers are doing with their technologies! We didn't know about it beforehand, but we are very pleased to see Old Maps Online is now featuring in the showcase of web applications they like in the Google Developers webpages.
See the Old Maps Online entry here: https://developers.google.com/showcase/#item=Old+Maps+Online
See the Old Maps Online entry here: https://developers.google.com/showcase/#item=Old+Maps+Online
Thursday, April 19, 2012
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.
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'.
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| University of Glasgow |
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'.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Meet us at ICA Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage - 7th International Workshop
Where:
Institut Cartogràfic de Catalunya ICC, Barcelona, Spain 19-20 April 2012
Topics:
- Digital map libraries and map collections: archiving, matching, management, networking and accessibility in-situ and in the web.
- Development of methodologies and standards applied on proper two- and three- dimensional digitisation of Cartographic Heritage objects, materials and documents.
- Digital map restoration.
- Digital technologies in map collections, including the digitisation of collections.
- Online presentation of maps in georeferenced and ungeoreferenced forms.
- Discovery, accessibility and retrieval of materials through a range of portals, INSPIRE and SDIs.
- New opportunities for cooperation and partnerships using digital technologies.
- Developing tools for the long-term preservation of digital map content.
- Open data relevant issues
More details at the workshop websites:
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Review of Old Maps Online Launch
Now the website has been live and accessible to the public for just over two weeks and the initial flurry of publicity is over we have a little time to pause and reflect on how the launch has gone.
We began with the special workshop "Working Digitally with Historical Maps" organised as part of the Association of American Geographers conference. It was held on the 25th February in the impressive Stephen A. Schwarzman Building the flagship building of the New York Public Library. The key note speech at that event announcing the website was jointly given by David Rumsey, Petr Pridal and Humphrey Southall.
The following Wednesday (29th) saw the main UK launch in the grand art deco surroundings of Chancellor's hall in Senate House, part of the University of London. The Gerald Alymer Seminar "Locating the Past" attracted 100 participants and saw a range of speakers talking about historical place and space from what we can learn spatially from paintings depicting Henry VIII's maritime battles, crowd-sourcing modern locations onto historical maps, linking places and surnames and mapping historical textual descriptions of places. The introduction to the day, including the announcement about the website launch, was given by Humphrey Southall whilst Paula gave demonstrations of the site in action throughout the day.
Wednesday last week (7th) saw Humphrey Southall again presenting and Paula demonstrating the site. This time in the equally appealing Weston room with its nineteenth century floor mosaic and stained glass windows in the Maughan Library at Kings College, London. The event involved a smaller, more specialised audience who work on bringing together geographical and historical data online discussed geocultures. Organised by the JISC-funded GECO project, "Geospatial" in the Cultural Heritage Domain, Past, Present & Future covered subjects as diverse as locating photos of London during the Blitz, charting information gleaned from historical ships logs, to ways of presenting historical Scottish city information through maps.
We will continue to demonstrate the website at upcoming events we are attending. Initial audience figures are good, by the 13th of March we had received nearly 150,000 unique users since we launched. This averages out at roughly 8,000 users per day, although our busiest day last week saw more than 30,000 unique users and over 10% of visitors returned.
We have had a reasonable amount of online press coverage and the site even appeared on Spanish TV. Although our press coverage has had less success in more traditional outlets we still feel relatively pleased with how well the message seems to be getting around. Something that is new to us, but has proved invaluable is the organic spread of knowledge about the site through social media. Twitter in particular has seen some very good comments and people around the world are still passing the site on this way.
Of course, like any new website which catches the public's attention, and as already mentioned in a previous posting, we have experienced some technical issues and in hindsight we perhaps should have left out the dynamic links to social media which caused most of them. The inclusion of a feedback feature and contact details seems to be positive move and has led to suggestions on what else people might like to see and offers to participate from more map collections and user testers.
Overall we are very pleased with the reaction to the launch of the site and we're now settling down to work hard on the next release.
We began with the special workshop "Working Digitally with Historical Maps" organised as part of the Association of American Geographers conference. It was held on the 25th February in the impressive Stephen A. Schwarzman Building the flagship building of the New York Public Library. The key note speech at that event announcing the website was jointly given by David Rumsey, Petr Pridal and Humphrey Southall.
The following Wednesday (29th) saw the main UK launch in the grand art deco surroundings of Chancellor's hall in Senate House, part of the University of London. The Gerald Alymer Seminar "Locating the Past" attracted 100 participants and saw a range of speakers talking about historical place and space from what we can learn spatially from paintings depicting Henry VIII's maritime battles, crowd-sourcing modern locations onto historical maps, linking places and surnames and mapping historical textual descriptions of places. The introduction to the day, including the announcement about the website launch, was given by Humphrey Southall whilst Paula gave demonstrations of the site in action throughout the day.
Wednesday last week (7th) saw Humphrey Southall again presenting and Paula demonstrating the site. This time in the equally appealing Weston room with its nineteenth century floor mosaic and stained glass windows in the Maughan Library at Kings College, London. The event involved a smaller, more specialised audience who work on bringing together geographical and historical data online discussed geocultures. Organised by the JISC-funded GECO project, "Geospatial" in the Cultural Heritage Domain, Past, Present & Future covered subjects as diverse as locating photos of London during the Blitz, charting information gleaned from historical ships logs, to ways of presenting historical Scottish city information through maps. | ||
|
We have had a reasonable amount of online press coverage and the site even appeared on Spanish TV. Although our press coverage has had less success in more traditional outlets we still feel relatively pleased with how well the message seems to be getting around. Something that is new to us, but has proved invaluable is the organic spread of knowledge about the site through social media. Twitter in particular has seen some very good comments and people around the world are still passing the site on this way.
Of course, like any new website which catches the public's attention, and as already mentioned in a previous posting, we have experienced some technical issues and in hindsight we perhaps should have left out the dynamic links to social media which caused most of them. The inclusion of a feedback feature and contact details seems to be positive move and has led to suggestions on what else people might like to see and offers to participate from more map collections and user testers.
Overall we are very pleased with the reaction to the launch of the site and we're now settling down to work hard on the next release.
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Publicity for Old Maps Online -- and who is visiting
Some on-line articles that have appeared about the site:
Gizmodo:
www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/03/easy-access-to-days-gone-by-with-old-maps-online
Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/old-maps-online-lets-you-find-your-way-around-17th-century-holy-roman-empire.ars
The Verge:
www.theverge.com/2012/3/5/2847607/old-maps-online-60000-library-search
About.com Geneaology:
http://genealogy.about.com/b/2012/03/07/old-maps-online-a-new-way-to-locate-historical-maps.htm
La Stampa (Milan):
http://www.lastampa.it/_web/cmstp/tmplrubriche/tecnologia/grubrica.asp?ID_blog=30&ID_articolo=10171&ID_sezione=38
Up to the end of Wednesday 7th March, we had had 81,276 "unique visitors", and the geographical distribution is interesting:
United States 25.7%
United Kingdom 14.3%
Italy 6.7%
Spain 5.9% (there was something on the TV in Barcelona)
Netherlands 5.3%
Russia 4.9%
Poland 4.7%
Romania 3.9%
Gizmodo:
www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/03/easy-access-to-days-gone-by-with-old-maps-online
Ars Technica:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2012/03/old-maps-online-lets-you-find-your-way-around-17th-century-holy-roman-empire.ars
The Verge:
www.theverge.com/2012/3/5/2847607/old-maps-online-60000-library-search
About.com Geneaology:
http://genealogy.about.com/b/2012/03/07/old-maps-online-a-new-way-to-locate-historical-maps.htm
La Stampa (Milan):
http://www.lastampa.it/_web/cmstp/tmplrubriche/tecnologia/grubrica.asp?ID_blog=30&ID_articolo=10171&ID_sezione=38
Up to the end of Wednesday 7th March, we had had 81,276 "unique visitors", and the geographical distribution is interesting:
United States 25.7%
United Kingdom 14.3%
Italy 6.7%
Spain 5.9% (there was something on the TV in Barcelona)
Netherlands 5.3%
Russia 4.9%
Poland 4.7%
Romania 3.9%
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