Dear All,
This is not exactly to do with maps, but people on this list have by now
given a great deal of help to my project ...
As well as image scanning historic maps and computerising historical
gazetteers (Groome's, Imperial, Bartholomew's), the Great Britain
Historical GIS project is computerising four of the best known accounts of
journeys around Britain (and trying to devise a framework for integrating
them with the rest of our content). Three have already been done: Arthur
Young, William Cobbett and Celia Fiennes.
The fourth is Daniel Defoe's "A Journey through the whole island of Britain
divided into circuits or journies". Here we have a major problem locating
a copy that meets ALL of three requirements:
(1) It must be out of copyright, which rules out all late 20th century
editions.
(2) It must be something that can reasonably be seen as a complete and
authoritative edition.
(3) We must be able to obtain a copy and pass it to our digitisation team
in Belfast (or possibly photocopy the whole book in situ). This obviously
tends to rule out any original copies.
We only have a few months more funding for our digitisation team, so this
is becoming urgent.
We would be most grateful for any advice you can give us, and in particular
any assistance you can give us with non-map library colleagues.
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: (07736) 727928
Web site: http://www.gbhgis.org
