Stuart Macdonald AddressingHistory Project Manager EDINA & Data Library University of Edinburgh

JISC-funded Community Content project 6 months (April 2010 – September 2010) Partner with NLS Advisory Board CC image courtesy of Flickr –

To create an online crowdsourcing tool which will combine data from digitised Scottish Post Office Directories (PODs) with contemporaneous historical maps CC image courtesy of Flickr –

Project will focus on 3 volumes of PODs: ; 1865; ) Historic maps georeferenced by NLS PODs digitised by NLS in conjunction with the Internet Archive Public domain CC image courtesy of Flickr –

CC image courtesy of Flickr – / / Tool will allow ‘the crowd’ to georeference POD entries by ‘clicking’ on a digitised map facilitating the addition of a grid reference to the OCR’d POD held in XML format in a database structure Sympathetic to tools developed by related projects incl. VUG, Edinburgh town atlas Tool built using open standards for interoperability with potential hosting infrastructures e.g NLS

Potential for linking with other spatially referenced resources e.g census Scoping mass geo-coding of PODs using OS Codepoint, Yahoo and Google geocoding services Also build APIs to exploit the value-added content Explore exposing content to LOD via RDF triples CC images courtesy of Flickr –

Interface has to be easy-to-use for a range of users Robust and scalable to accommodate 400 Scottish PODs currently being digitised CC image courtesy of Flickr – Mechanism to check user-generated content such as georeferences, tags/annotations Possible crowdsourcing of mass geo-coded content

Edinburgh Beltane – beacon of partnership & CHSS Knowledge Transfer office Amplification of tool and APIs via Social Media Channels Open knowledge evangelists – spread the gospel according to AddressingHistory! CC image courtesy of Flickr –

THANKING YOU! Acknowledgements: JISC National Library of Scotland - Visualising Urban Geographies (VUG) project – Edinburgh City Libraries –