Featured Title:
Pictures from the Past: Art and Symbols of the Neolithic and Bronze Age |
 |
| Stone Circles, A Modern Builder's Guide |
 |
| Login |
|
Don't have an account yet? You can create one. As a registered user you have some advantages like your own home page, fewer ads, and your contributions link to your page. |
| Who's Online |
There are currently, 131 guests and 2 members online.
You are a guest. To join in, please register for free by clicking here |
| |
Forum: General Forum
Moderated by : Andy B , TimPrevett , Klingon , sem , MickM , TheCaptain , bat400 , coldrum , davidmorgan , Runemage , SolarMegalith
Respond to: Norfolk E-Map Explorer - Mapping the layers of an English county
|
| Review your Reply |
Andy B
Joined:
13-02-2001
Messages: 6991
from Surrey, UK
 OFF-Line
|  New Message Posted!2007-06-08 17:36
David Gurney, Tim Arnold and Sheila Bullard created Norfolk E-Map Explorer – the web at its best.
Anyone who wants to track down maps and aerial photographs of an area is probably resigned to the need to visit a number of museums, libraries and record offices or archive centres to collect the information. For one part of England, Norfolk County Council's cultural services has changed all that with a site that has brought together a wide range of resources on the web.
The Norfolk E-Map Explorer ( http://www.historic-maps.norfolk.gov.uk) was developed as part of the East of England Sense of Place Project ( http://www.senseofplaceeast.org.uk), a lottery-funded digitisation project to create an internet bank of learning resources offering access to the culture, heritage and diversity of the region. Within this bigger initiative, the E-Map Explorer fulfils an essential part of Norfolk County Council's commitment to make freely and widely available its superb resources on the county's archaeology, historic environment, museum collections and archives.
Norfolk E-Map Explorer was completed in April 2005. It gives access to more than 12,000 vertical aerial photographs of the county from surveys by the Royal Air Force in 1946 and Norfolk county council in 1988, and 1,200 maps, including tithe maps, enclosure maps and first edition six inches to the mile Ordnance Survey maps from the Norfolk Record Office ( http://www.archives.norfolk.gov.uk) and the Norfolk Library and Information Service ( http://www.library.norfolk.gov.uk). By bringing these together on the web, the site allows users to make detailed comparisons of the Norfolk landscape between the mid and late 19th century and the mid and late 20th century, something that cannot be achieved when using the documents stored at disparate locations.
At the touch of a button, archaeological curators, consultants, contractors, researchers and local historians can obtain key information without having to visit up to four different locations across the county where the original resources are housed. The site has proved to be even more popular with non-professional archaeologists and the general public, sparking widespread interest in the Norfolk landscape, its field patterns and historic buildings.
Within the collections each individual photograph or map was scanned and georectified. This presented some interesting challenges, as the largest tithe map in Norfolk is more than six square metres in size! The digital images were then cleverly joined together to form continuous and seamless layers. Users of the website can select an area by postcode, place or grid reference, choose which resources to view or compare, pan in any direction, zoom in and out, make images transparent and superimpose them, view as large images or view original maps. The number of pages on the website is actually unlimited, as each one is generated dynamically to meet the individual user's specific requirements.
The site has received more than 100,000 visits since its launch, and during 2006 there was an average of over 300 visits per day. In 2005 the Norfolk E-Map Explorer won an Alan Ball Local History Award, the only website to do so, and in 2006 the site was runner-up for a British Archaeological Award in the Channel 4 information and communication technology category. Work on the site continues, and there are several ideas being considered to make the site even bigger and better!
Other Norfolk County Council websites include the Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service ( http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk), and Norfolk Online Access to Heritage or NOAH ( http://www.noah.norfolk.gov.uk) where you can do cross-domain searches of Norfolk archives, library catalogues, museum collections, photographic collections and newspaper articles. These will be joined in 2007 by The Norfolk Heritage Explorer, an online version of the Norfolk historic environment record, with 50,000 records of the county's monuments, finds and historic buildings.
David Gurney is principal archaeologist at Norfolk Museums & Archaeology Service, Tim Arnold is ICT officer (systems) at Norfolk County Council and Sheila Bullard is their ICT services manager.
Nicked from the latest British Archaeology online edition:
http://www.britarch.ac.uk/BA/ba93/ontheweb.shtml
| |
|
Main News