TOWARDS A NATIONAL PLACE-NAME GAZETTEER
Following on from earlier mailings, this is a brief announcement that the
New Opportunities Fund (NOF), under its Digitisation of Learning Materials,
has awarded the University of Portsmouth Pnds 620,000 for a project titled
"Great Britain Historical GIS/Gazetteer/Atlas: A Vision of Britain through
Time". A central part of this project is the construction of a systematic
historical gazetteer for Great Britain, although it also covers
construction of a web site providing access to a wide range of statistical
information about the regions and localities of Britain including data down
to parish level from every census since 1801. We have already had a good
deal of support from the National Council on Archives and the National
Register of Archives in developing this project, and they will be supplying
members of our management committee.
We will also be collaborating with the British Library, who will have
primary responsible for dissemination and who will be making further
announcements about the eventual web resource for life-long
learners. However, we hope to work closely with archives around the
country and two more specific announcements need to be made on this list:
Firstly, a combination of the results of various consultations and the
significant budget cut imposed on us by NOF means we need to distinguish
CAREFULLY between two levels of coverage:
(a) A systematic gazetteer/authority list for administrative units down to
parish level and sometimes below. This will provide broadly equivalent
coverage to Youngs' "Local Administrative Units" but will be derived mainly
from our existing gazetteers of units covered by the census plus, we hope,
the earlier administrative units catalogued by the Public Record Office's
E179 project. Unlike Youngs, it will extend to Scotland and Wales, which
of course involves additional collaborators. As far as possible, each
administrative unit will be associated with a geographical area, based on
our existing boundary mapping work, rather than just a point. The system
will not be, strictly speaking, a thesaurus as formal hierarchies are
problematic; we are hoping to implement the gazetteer content standard
developed by the Alexandria Digital Library project at Santa
Barbara. Because administrative units are both geographical areas and
corporate bodies, we hope that the end product can be treated as a
systematic authority list. We hope that local archives will assist us by
checking our work for their areas.
(b) A more comprehensive place-names gazetteer. While the NOF-funding will
enable us to create very extensive foundations for such a systematic
national resource, this could not be completed in two to three years
however much funding we have. We have already held a meeting with
archivists from Hampshire, Surrey and West Sussex plus place-names
researchers based at Sussex University and linked to the English
Place-Names Survey (EPNS). The latter have already computerised all
place-names appearing on the earliest available six inch to the mile maps
for Hampshire and West Sussex, and at least for these areas we plan to
construct a more comprehensive system. Extension nationally would require
longer-term funding for part of our team, which might be provided by
another current application, but it would also need assistance, probably
unpaid, to input names from maps following the procedures of the EPNS. We
have some ideas about how to provide volunteers with computerised copies of
the six inch sheets, and WE WONDER WHETHER LOCAL ARCHIVES MIGHT BE ABLE TO
HELP US FIND SUCH VOLUNTEERS. However, we need to be clear that our
commitments to nof do not cover completing such a gazetteer. Places which
were not administrative units would be located by single grid references.
Secondly, the funding from NOF is almost entirely to pay for staff based at
three universities: a team in Belfast computerising both census reports
and historical gazetteers (for example, we will be computerising all six
volumes of the "Imperial Gazetteer" of 1870-2); a computer whiz at Leeds
creating tools to present statistical information in user-friendly
graphical form; and a team in Portsmouth working mainly on the gazetteer
and other geographical frameworks. Much of the money is to extend existing
appointments, but we will be making two new appointments in
Portsmouth. The first is a database programmer, responsible for both the
infrastructure for the gazetteer and much of the final web site, and until
we have made this key appointment we will not know how much money is left
for the second post.
The second post is intended for someone with training in librarianship,
information science or a similar discipline, and will be responsible for
working with the database programmer to implement various information
standards, notably those of the Data Documentation Initiative
(http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/DDI), to facilitate resource discovery within
our statistical database, and the Alexandria Digital Library gazetteer
content standard (http://alexandria.sdc.ucsb.edu/gazetteer). Both are
XML-based, and it is likely that our project will play a significant role
in extending these standards. For example, the handling of geographical
coverage is currently poorly developed within the DDI, while the ADL
standard needs extensions in the areas of feature-type thesaurii, multiple
languages (e.g. Welsh and Gaelic names) and the additional information
needed by linguistic place-names researchers.
This post would run for, at most, two years and the ideal person to fill it
may well already be in post somewhere, in an archive, museum or
library. We cannot advertise this post until we have made more progress
with the database post, but I would be interested in hearing INFORMALLY
from anyone interested in exploring the potential for filling this post
through secondment. Existing relevant expertise is probably as relevant as
the exact hours worked, and we would hope it would be possible for them to
maintain some contact with their employer. As I understand NOF rules, the
relevant funding would then be transferred to the employing institution to
pay a temporary replacement.
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
Until September 2001:
Visiting Scholar, St. Catharine's College,
Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RL
Portsmouth HGIS team: (023) 9284 2500
Cambridge Tel: (01223) 523854
Mobile: (0796) 808 5454
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