Cunard and Liverpool Buildings, Liverpool, Lancs., from UK Photo Finder
The National Archives have produced UK Photo Finder, a map-based tool for finding historic photos in your area.
The free tool is one of their ‘Lab’ projects, and so is open for comments and queries, though you may find a few bugs here and there (one user found it doesn’t work on Firefox for the Mac, and I’ve found it can occasionally refresh at annoying moments). Nip on to the site and have a play around.
There are 31 photos of Liverpool City Centre (although there’s a sneaky one of the Sefton Park Peter Pan statue in there); 5 attached to Huyton; and 18 on the Wirral.
The images are also shown attached to their record cards, keeping the photos ‘in context’ as archives, not just as photographs.
The photos at the moment are exclusively from the important Dixon-Scott collection, although I suspect that if this pilot is successful, they will extend it to other collections. I hope they do, as this is a really great site. Dixon-Scott is of great interest to readers of this blog, as he saw and recorded the changing landscape of Britain with the expressed aim of preserving what he saw as the disappearing landscape.
It’s also quiet similar to the independently produced (and ‘crowd-sourced’) Historypin project, which I also recommend you have a look at (and which also has a few bugs to iron out).
I know, I know, you’ve been waiting and waiting for this! So without much further ado, I present a selection of old maps of interest to the avid and casual Liverpool historian.
In this, the second of two posts on maps of Liverpool, I want to point you in the direction of a load of maps from before the Ordnance Survey was established. Read more
English Heritage Archives is a new website which allows you to search the catalogues of the National Monuments Record in Swindon, without having to visit.
There are basic and advanced search pages, the ability to save your searches, and individual records, and you can order copies of any archives. As with the normal Enquiry and Research Services, they’ll then send you photocopies of any photos relevant to your interests, and you can order better quality prints. The original service is still available for those who want to use it.
The site is part of the NMR’s group of websites such as ViewFinder (historic photos) and Heritage Explorer (educational material), and where an image is available on ViewFinder, you’ll see it in your search results on EH Archives.
The site went live at the start of April, so the team who put the site together need your feedback to help them improve it. They’re also interested in how useful it is, and which features are most used.
There’s a link in the left hand menu to their feedback survey, so if you’re a professional or amateur researcher have a play around and vent forth your opinions!
Disclosure: I work at the NMR, and helped co-ordinate the testing of the site. But don’t let that stop you telling me what you think in the comments!
Over the past few weeks I’ve come across a handful of very interesting looking sites for those of you with a local history interest. The best thing about them is that they’re after your input, so pop along and see what you can contribute!
Building History is a specialised wiki site, much like the (in)famous Wikipedia and the Liverpool Wiki. It encourages users to submit information about any road or building to its database, even the one you live in! Almost 200 roads and nearly 300 buildings have been added, and the site’s only been online since October 2009.
All you need is an email address, and you can get going. The Warwick page is the most complete, so use that as a template. Liverpool is there, waiting for someone to add something, though note that it’s placed in Lancashire!
For those privacy-concerned individuals (like me), it’s good to know they only allow publicly-available data to be added (census data, for example).
Finally, we have the Open Plaques project. This, in its own words, is “a service that aims to find and provide data about all the commemorative ‘plaques’ (often blue and round) that can be found across the UK and worldwide”.
You can browse their database via peoples’ names, places, or organisation, and the site wants all the plaques photographed, tagged with their geographical location, and have their colour identified. There’s a neat little graph on the home page letting you know how they’re getting on.
The data comes from a variety of sources (including English Heritage’s blue plaques site and Freedom of Information requests) which have been cleaned up for presentation on the site.
You can help them by getting in touch, or taking a photo of one and uploading it to Flickr. If you tag the photo correctly (as explained on the site) it will appear next to the relevant entry. Brilliant! All the data is free for you to reuse, and the maps are created using OpenStreetMap. You can follow the project via Twitter: @openplaques, or on their .
The University of Liverpool and John Moores University are assessing the impact of the 2008 Capital of Culture year in a project called Impacts 08. Research has gone on since 2005, and is now at the stage of judging the effects the year had on the city of Liverpool.
Already a whole load of reports are available divided into themes of economics, taking part, culture and the arts, as well as others. My eye was naturally drawn to Liverpool 08 – Centre of the Online Universe, which covers the web and social media (unfortunately my own sites don’t get a mention ).
I was going to pick and choose a couple of read, but to be honest, these all look like interesting stuff! Let me know what you think of these in the comments section below. Do they reflect your experience? Did they miss anything out?
Trading Places: A History of Liverpool Docks
Trading Places: A history of Liverpool docks
This looks like a fairly old corner of the Liverpool Museums site, but Trading Places is a simple and informative interactive map of Liverpool’s dock system and its history. The left-hand menu highlights the docks involved in trade with different parts of the world, as well as the docks’ names and the very reason for the dock systems construction. There’s also a timeline of significant dates along the bottom.
This is a great little tool, and its slightly old-fashioned look and pop-up windows just reflects the simplicity of getting the information across. I’ve been playing around with interactive web maps for a good few years now, so it’s great to see what can be achieved very simply. There’s even an accessible version (click on “begin the voyage”)!
Kudos to Laura Davis’ blog on the Daily Post website, whose advent calendar pointed me to this site, and which has been an lovely little source of historic websites over the last week! Trading Places is the destination behind door 11.
This site, the sister site to Historic Liverpool, covers the continuing history of Liverpool, including building developments, museum events, old maps and other historic websites.
RT @arch4schools: just said to wife "I need to go on a crusade to ASDA as we've got no Salad in" - made me laugh, but is clearly a histo ... 1 week ago
