I suspect quite a few members of this list are aware of the somewhat
troubled launch of the Vision of Britain web site -- for fairly bizarre
reasons, we obtained funding for things like graphic design and actually
buying a web server only this Easter, and one consequence was too little
time for testing. And then the publicity was better than we expected ...
Anyway, the site went live for the third time yesterday, but this time it
has stayed up so we are finally in business, although for now some of the
mapping options do not work:
www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
What is fully functional is the "name authority" side of the site, but it
needs a bit of explanation. THE NAME SEARCHING ON THE HOME PAGE IS NOT THE
MAIN FACILITY FOR PEOPLE LIKE ARCHIVISTS!
The site has been funded by the Big Lottery Fund (nee New Opportunities
Fund) and that means our primary audience has to be a non-specialist
one. User testing showed they were very confused when they typed in
"Reading" and got back 9 hits, all of which were to do with the same place
in Berkshire -- or "Bolton" and got 17 hits, 9 of which were to do with the
town in Lancashire, but the other 8 related to 4 quite different
Boltons. At one stage, the only names our homepage understood, as distinct
from postcodes, were the 408 local authorities of modern Britain but it now
searches a simplified list of towns and villages.
To get to what we hope is a reasonable on-line equivalent to Youngs "Local
Administrative Units of England", you need to choose "Expert Search" and
then select "Administrative Units Search". You can then search a list of
over 51,000 administrative units derived primarily from Youngs, Melville
Richards' "Welsh Administrative and Territorial Units" (1969) and the
Scottish Archives Network Gazetteer. It also includes the manors of
Hampshire, Norfolk and Yorkshire, from the Manorial Documents Register, and
a good deal of additional information from census reports -- some
additional units, a lot of additional relationships and variant names, and
boundary change information. The search interface lets you use wild cards
or look for sound-alikes, and narrow the search by county and type of unit.
Some caveats:
<> As the site should make clear, our inventory of administrative units is
only one facet of the overall project, and much of the rest was to do with
historical census data -- statistics about places rather than
individual-level data. Youngs and, in particular, Melville Richards did
not give us enough information on certain kinds of unit reported on
extensively by the census: almost all of the information in the system on
Poor Law Unions/Registration Districts and pre-1930 local government
districts in Wales, and on Registration sub-Districts is our own work. We
do draw very extensively on Youngs but ultimately this is a new work.
<> There are some kinds of unit covered by Youngs but not used extensively
by the census which are not currently in our system. The two most
important are probably ecclesiastical units above the level of parishes and
parliamentary constituencies. This summer we received a new small grant
from the Pilgrim Trust which gets us started on ecclesiastical units -- if
you search our system carefully, you will find that dioceses,
archdeaconries etc are defined, and the Diocese of Lichfield has actually
been done. As it happens, I am off this morning to a meeting with the
House of Commons Library about constituency information -- but finishing
either of these needs substantial extra funding.
<> Every parish in Youngs, Melville Richards and the SCAN gazetteer should
be in our system, with the name they give it. However, work to cross-check
these listings with the census parish tables is continuing. This is
leading to us adding a great many variant names -- again, especially in
Wales -- and also to us identifying errors in our main sources. We can now
match all but ten out of 14,643 rows in our completely independent
transcription of the 1911 census parish table with the gazetteer, and those
ten problem cases are all a bit odd. The 1911 table is particularly
important because it includes both Registration Counties, Districts and
sub-Districts, and also Administrative Counties and Local Government
Districts. However, getting to the same point for other dates is going to
take a bit longer; to take one extreme case, we are working with an again
completely independent transcription of the 1831 census parish table, and
at the moment around 2,500 out of c. 11,500 parishes do not match. NNB
this matching work involves us adding the versions of names that appear in
the census reports to our gazetteer, so we are ending up with far more
variant names than Youngs provides.
<> If you simply want to find out where some place is, you may well be
better off with a modern site like Multimap or Streetmap. Within our own
site, don't use either the admin units search or the "places" search from
the home page -- use the "Descriptive Gazetteer" search, which is another
option within expert search. This searches three late 19th century
published gazetteers, including the 1st edition of Bartholomew's Gazetteer
of the British Isles. The simplest way of searching these looks just at
the headwords, but you can also search the full text, where many additional
placenames appear. Our interface again lets you narrow searches by county
and by type of entry.
We are working towards a further release of the system next spring -- which
is also when the residual funding we have for a reduced team runs out --
and until then we would strongly advise against anyone using the ID numbers
in our system. Incidentally, those numbers include a check digit, to make
them slightly more usable by human beings.
This has all taken a horribly long time, but I believe we have created
something which goes well beyond computerising existing authorities. Enjoy.
Best wishes,
Humphrey Southall
====================================
Humphrey Southall
Reader in Geography/Director,
Great Britain Historical GIS Project
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace, Portsmouth PO1 3HE
GIS Project Office: (023) 9284 2500
Home office: (020) 8853 0396
Mobile: 0796 808 5454
Web site: http://www.VisionOfBritain.org.uk
About us: http://www.gbhgis.org
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