British Library Geo-referencing project completes in four days!

The British Library's project to work with its users to geo-reference historical maps, announced her in an earlier posting, was expected to take some months but completed its work in under a week. This has enabled us to include over seven hundred maps from the original Ordnance Surveyors' drawings and from the Crace Collection in the first version of Old Maps Online.

The project used Klokan Technology's cloud-hosted Georeference software, and we would be very interested in discussing its use with other libraries who hold substantial numbers of scanned maps that lack geo-referencing. This is certainly not the only way to create the geo-referencing needed to add maps to Old Maps Online, but avoids both the need for manual geo-referencing by specialists and libraries having to set up specialised software.

The British Library are planning a second round of geo-referencing, with a further 1,000 maps, and we look forward to adding them to Old Maps Online.