This is, in part, a reply to an e-mail from Kate Haslem at the
Gloucestershire Record Office:

>Dear Dr Southall
>I am sorry I missed your presentation to the CALM2000 User Group last year.
>I am interested in using the details of  historical Administrative units
>similar to Frederic Youngs as a front end to Calm place name enquiries. I
>understand that you will be including these in your database and I wonder
>(a) how you are getting on with this  and (b) whether you have any thoughts
>on how your database might be made accessible to or through Calm.

Dick Sargent of the National Register of Archives arranged for me to speak
at the CALM2000 user group meeting in Shrewsbury last June.  I explained
there that the Great Britain Historical GIS project, having almost
completed a computer system recording the CHANGING boundaries of the
administrative units of England and Wales, covering Civil Parishes
1876-1973, Registration Districts (and Registration Counties) c.1840-1911,
and Local Government Districts (and Administrative Counties) 1911-1973, was
starting work on a linked gazetteer for administrative units based around
Youngs "Local Administrative Units of England".  Two reasons for doing this
are to help track down units missing from the GIS, and to make it more
useful as a tool for working with information for the pre-1876
period;  there is limited potential for mapping changing boundaries at
earlier dates, but experiments with sample counties showed that our 1876
boundaries can be a useful framework with data from much earlier periods
(and Darby's mapping of Domesday England used 1888 base maps!).  However, a
computerised Youngs would be a very useful resource in its own right.

I have been able to assemble enough funding to get started on this work
and, after considerable delays recruiting staff, Paula Aucott has now
joined me with funding to the end of this year;  Paula has a Masters in
English Local History from Leicester.  With other funding we have also
recruited Nick Burton, with five years experience in Geographical
Information Systems working at English Heritage (please send any detailed
enquiries to Paula: [log in to unmask]).  We obtained permission from
the Royal Historical Society to computerise Youngs some time back, and are
now starting on the detailed work.

Over the next year, we are undertaking two tasks:

(a) We are creating a version of the Youngs text which is inside a computer
but largely "as is":  the information in the three parts, on parishes,
districts and parliamentary units will be separate, and the often complex
entries in the parish section will be simply lumps of text.  Our aim is to
structure the parish entries so that they can be searched over the web by
county and parish name, and our hope is that this will make them a resource
of some real use.  However, this is clearly an unsatisfactory compromise.

(b) We will work on RESTRUCTURING Youngs for three pilot counties:
Hampshire, Surrey and Sussex.  For these counties, we will link information
from different parts of Youngs, linking the parish entries to the districts
and so on.  NB we already hold a great deal of information from census
reports, notably boundary change lists, in more structured form and we will
be exploring how far we can make use of this to 'replicate' Youngs.  We
also aim to consult closely with archivists in these three counties on
corrections to Youngs, and also on what the final facility should look
like.  Dick Sargent at the NRA, and the National Council on Archives, have
been assisting us in setting up these collaborations and we should be
getting in touch in the near future.

The obvious question is when and how will we be able to go further.  Here I
have to be vague, but at the moment there seem to be good prospects of our
obtaining much more substantial funding, which would enable us to extend
the restructured Youngs nationally over the next 3-4 years.  One goal of
the pilot work described above is to develop procedures for working with
archivists by post and electronically, the aim being to both assemble
existing computerised place-name finding aids held by individual archives
and to create mechanisms by which, in the longer term, archivists and
volunteers can input locally-held paper finding aids into a national resource.

This said, I should express one fundamental limitation I see to any
"place-name authority list", computerised or paper-based.  Constructing
authority lists for administrative units, which are as much organisations
as geographical areas, is clearly possible and Youngs provides much of what
we need, at least for England (we are talking to various people about Wales
and Scotland as well).  However, I am unconvinced that authority lists CAN
be constructed for "places" which lack legal definitions, as place-names
are basically nick-names.  Authority files for properties are again
feasible, and in the longer term we can work towards such files for
specific sub-sets of properties, notably major estates/"country seats".  I
would be interested to hear other views on this.

Meanwhile, members of the list may be interested in a couple of
experimental resources which are accessible at:

                 http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/gbhgis/gaz

The first is a searchable copy of the Office of National Statistics' 1981
census gazetteer for England and Wales, which includes grid references and
membership of higher level units for over 62,000 place-names, many of them
being simply 'localities'.  I am afraid we have already found quite a few
mistakes in this.

The second is a demonstration system based around what appears to be a
thesaurus of administrative units, although it is in fact just the 1911
census parish-level table;  the advantage of that particular year is that
it lists both 19th century Registration units and 20th century local
government districts.  I know of one record office who were using an
earlier version of this that we had on our old London web site as an
authority file, but the main interest of this is that it provides a route
into data from selected tables in our statistical database, and for a few
places access to a wider range of content including entries from historical
gazetteers and travellers' accounts of visits (try 'Ledbury' or 'Colwall'
in Herefordshire to get a feel for this, and look for data on religion to
see the linked mapping facilities we are planning).  This is really a
demonstration/testbed linked to the major long-term funding we are seeking,
and I would appreciate comments.  One point I already know is that the
visual design is poor -- we spent about 5 minutes on that aspect.

Best wishes,

Humphrey Southall



====================================================
Dr. Humphrey Southall,
Reader in Geography /
Director, Gt. Britain Historical GIS Project,
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth,
Buckingham Building, Lion Terrace,
PORTSMOUTH PO1 3HE,  ENGLAND

Direct Line:   (023) 9284 2500
Dept. Fax:     (023) 9284 2512
Mobile:        (0796) 808 5454
Home Page:     www.geog.port.ac.uk/gbhgis