AddressingHistory

Nicola Osborne AddressingHistory Project Officer EDINA Social Media Officer http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/ http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/ http://addressinghistory.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ LIFE-SHARE 29-03-2011 Colloquium

Project focused on 3 volumes of Post Office Directories (PODs): 1784-5; 1865; 1905-6) Historic maps georeferenced by NLS PODs digitised by NLS in conjunction with the Internet Archive Public domain Supported by…

Project Team: Stuart Macdonald, Project Manager Nicola Osborne, Project Officer Joe Vernon, Software Engineer Project Partners

What are the Post Office Directories and Why do they matter?

1865 1905 Who would live in a road like this?

Post Office Directories were published annually and accompanying maps were updated more frequently than the Ordnance Survey especially in rural areas. They contain names, addresses, profession and professional addresses as well a historical adverts. They therefore offer a point of connection from birth, marriage and death certificates, to the Census to family letters, to business records. They also include an unusual amount of information on women who were not recorded in many other resources at this time. Over 700 directories have been digitised by the National Library of Scotland and made available for free online.

To build up our community whilst AddressingHistory was developed we set up a very active project blog and social media presences

Content included updates on the project, items about upcoming events around local and family history and invited guest blog posts

Facebook helped us to reach new audiences and spread project news shared virally

Twitter enabled us to:
Share news about the project and…
Share new blog posts, videos, images
Retweet other interesting history and genealogy resources
Get word out about the launch (#AHLaunch)
Recruit guest bloggers
Take part in local history events

Making our digitised data more tangible High Resolution CC images for Press Coming soon… trailers

We wanted to make it really easy for people to hear about AddressingHistory through:
Working with Edinburgh Research & Innovation and Edinburgh Beltane Beacon for Public Engagement to spread the word to other projects and organisations
Direct contact with local and family history organisations and bloggers
Dedicated Press Section on the blog

We have encouraged, engaged with and blog posts and news items across the web – we have a better idea about how we are being covered and the bloggers and website owners know we appreciate their coverage of the project (many were invited to our preview & launch).

On 17 th November 2010 we launched AddressingHistory Locations have been detected from addresses but users can (and do) report or correct errors from the search page

1 id, forename, surname, profession, address, category, googlelat, googlelon, crowdlat, crowdlon 184338, Charles, Brims, , 15 South College street, Edinburgh, Scotland, , 5 In addition to viewing results users can download data in standardised formats

We also launched an API to enable mashups!

50 Invited Guests and Stakeholders and blog readers attended our launch event… The API was featured and publicised on ProgrammableWeb

We encourage AH users to share their enthusiasm!

We sought coverage throughout the project: presentations at IASSIST, OKScotland, RepositoryFringe and the CILIPS Autumn Gathering. We attended Perth 800 and will attend the Scottish Association of Family History Societies Conference 2011. Articles: Scottish Genealogist: Quarterly Journal of the Scottish Genealogy Society, The Herald, Border Telegraph, Bristol and Avon Family History Society Journal, Family History Monthly, Practical Family History, Discover my Past Scotland, ALISS Quarterly

More Information AddressingHistory Web Tool: http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/ AddressingHistory Blog: http://addressinghistory.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ Contact Us: [email_address] @addresshistory Image Credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawgbyte77/3058355981/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/napfisk/4762810231/ All other images by AddressingHistory (http://flickr.com/photos/addressinghistory)

AddressingHistory

by EDINA, University of Edinburgh on May 02, 2011

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