Sunday 24 October 2021

Recent additions to National Library of Scotland maps platform

It was great to hear Chris Fleet on Saturday's Scottish Indexes conference discussing future plans for the NLS maps platform (https://maps.nls.uk), with plans to have half a million images online by 2025, including a substantial amount of new out of copyright material for English and Welsh OS maps, and some European additions. 

In the meantime, the following are some of the recent additions to the ever growing site:

Scottish water mills website
This new web resource shows the locations and details of over 9,000 mills in Scotland in the 19th century. You can query and filter the mill records by name, mill type, date, and related features, as well as compare distributions of mills in a split-screen viewer. There is also supporting information about mills in Scotland, the project workflow to create the mills data, and how to download the mills data. The online resource was created during a six month placement by Iara Calton, an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership PhD student at the University of Glasgow.

OS Six-inch Scotland first edition - railway and other variant states (1840s-1880s)
We have added an additional 1,824 Ordnance Survey Six-inch to the mile, first edition maps of Scotland online (1840s-1880s). These are an earlier set of flat sheets to the initial set we have had online since 2008. In some cases these new sheets are useful for showing the variant states of these maps, including those which show railway additions, updates to towns, county boundary sheet changes, security deletions, administrative boundary changes, as well as related variant information in the map margins. Read further information about these new additions. In other cases, these maps have different annotations, marks or paper tone, which may be preferred as copies.

New guide - Maps for researching Scottish Woodland History
We have put together a new guide on Maps for researching Scottish Woodland History. Maps provide a wealth of information about woodland history, as well as on woodland archaeology, industry, management, and military use. This guide picks out the most useful maps for viewing and understanding trees and woodland, as well as changes in woodland cover over time. It looks at different definitions and types of woodland and how different map-makers represented woodland. The guide also includes links to downloadable datasets, details of resources that are not online, as well as references for further reading.

OS 25 inch 'blue-and-black' drawings, Scotland, 1890s-1940s
This set of 694 Ordnance Survey 'blue-and-black' drawings show revision for the 25 inch to the mile maps, between the 1890s and the 1940s. This revision process drew new edition information in black ink on a printing of the previous edition in light blue. When this was photographed, the blue would not reproduce, so details not required or no longer present on the ground appear in blue. Military and related sites were added in black, but some of these were subsequently erased from the final printed maps. We have scanned all sheets which include stamps by Ordnance Survey referring to deletions where these were required, as well as all sheets in the counties of Linlithgow and Nairn.

New guide - Maps for Researching House and Building History
Are you interested in looking into the history of a house or building? We have put together a new guide on Maps for Researching House and Building History which highlights some of the most relevant maps to use as documentary sources. The maps are arranged roughly chronologically, covering rural and urban areas, with links to the maps and further information about them on our webite. We also include information on recent buildings and map copyright, as well as further relevant resources, both online and in print.

For the relevant links and further detail, please visit the NLS maps Recent Additions page at https://maps.nls.uk/additions.html.

Chris

My new book Tracing Your Irish Ancestors Through Land Records is now available to buy at https://bit.ly/IrishLandRecords. Also available - Sharing Your Family History Online, Tracing Your Scottish Family History on the Internet, Tracing Your Irish Family History on the Internet (2nd ed), and Tracing Your Scottish Ancestry Through Church and State Records - to purchase, please visit https://bit.ly/ChrisPatonPSbooks. Further news published daily on The Scottish GENES Facebook page, and on Twitter @genesblog.

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