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