Where was I today? 10th November 2016

[whole diary]

[stuving]

It seems to be that NLS has stolen a march on others in digitising old, out of copyright, UK^▸ (United Kingdom) maps. Others have done so, but not as comprehensively or as user friendly.

NLS has quickly established itself as the go to place online for historic UK mapping. It easily beats the limited free content from Ordnance Survey.

I think they've done what they've done because they can. That they are Scottish based is largely irrelevant.

That's pretty much my view. They seem to have a more open view of copyright in the digitised image itself than some other libraries, and were keen to put their Scottish maps collection on line. Having done that, and made a reasonably effective user interface, they just kept going through the rest of their UK map collection.

I have also found their WW1 trench maps very helpful, and note they have georeferenced some of them too.

[Chris from Nailsea]

I've no problem at all with them being the National Library of Scotland: it was the "All of which is to be seen on the 1906 OS^▸ (Ordnance Survey) 6" map, available from NLS" in stuving's post that spooked me!  

[stuving]

I've no problem at all with them being the National Library of Scotland: it was the "All of which is to be seen on the 1906 OS^▸ (Ordnance Survey) 6" map, available from NLS" in stuving's post that spooked me!  

Or do you mean "available from NLS"? In the past that would, idiomatically, usually mean "for sale". Now, I'm not so sure - it's available to see, or available on line, which I guess is what counts today.

[Chris from Nailsea]

I shall set up a stall tomorrow at NLS and see if I can flog any of them.  All proceeds to charity. 

[old original]

Anyone else tried sliding the blue dot in the bottom left corner on the NLS map? Now that's clever...

[stuving]

Anyone else tried sliding the blue dot in the bottom left corner on the NLS map? Now that's clever...

That's why I linked to that georeferenced presentation, as it was appropriate to the topic. It's also an example of what I meant by "a reasonably effective user interface"; the site is a bit clunky, but the technical display of the maps is very competent.

What you lose with the georeferencing is a choice of all the dated maps and series for a place. Obviously the seamless georeferenced map layer needs a nearly complete set of maps of a similar age. Since navigating from a linked page is a bit limited, and in any case some sideways links are missing,  here's a tip - if in doubt, go to "Map home", then down through the menus. Then avoid the top two UK^▸ (United Kingdom)-wide series, which are only library indexes without linked images.

I see that they have recently added some more huge-scale (1:500) English town plans, all of them south-west of Cheltenham so some are quite small places. They date from around 1885, and cover 24 towns in all - including (yes!) Taunton, though not Melksham...

[stuving]

These NLS on-line maps may be very useful to us, but of course there are losers. I got a catalogue through the mail yesterday from Alan Godfrey Maps, from whom I've bought quite a few reproduced OS^▸ (Ordnance Survey) maps in the past. It's going to be hard to justify buying any more if they are on line, isn't it?