EDINA newsline
June 2010: Volume 15 Issue 2
EDINA in partnership with the National Library of Scotland (NLS) have been awarded a JISC Rapid Innovation grant for the AddressingHistory project to develop an online, crowd-sourcing tool which will enable users to plot the location of any address, street name, advertisement or listing from digitised historical Scottish Post Office Directories on to an historical map of the same period.
Both digitised resources are being provided, without licence restriction and as part of an ongoing digitisation exercise, by the NLS who will also share digital mapping and geo-coding expertise.
During the six-month project, AddressingHistory will provide a tool which will access three eras of Edinburgh mapping and Post Office Directories (1784-5; 1865; 1905-6). The technologies demonstrated will be scalable to the full collection of digitised materials, which include 400 Post Office Directories and associated maps covering the whole of Scotland.
We would like to hear from researchers and those interested in Edinburgh’s history who may be interested in testing the tool when developed.