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Making Sense of Historic Political Landscape

21 May 2008

Digitisation experts at Birmingham City University have recently been helping an ambitious project to digitise national political boundaries. Historical maps covering the entire British Isles have been scanned in order to make them available on the web for the first time.

The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) funded project, called the Historic Boundaries of Britain, is managed by the University of Portsmouth. It has been working closely with Birmingham City University’s digitisation unit, which specialises in large format scanning, to digitise thirteen volumes of bound, fragile, fold out historical period boundary maps.

The project intends to help anyone interested in local politics and its changing landscape not just scholars and would be Peter Snows. The project began in 2007 and the results are scheduled to be available in the public domain on the Vision of Britain through Time web site in 2009, possibly before the next general election!  

See the Visions of Britan website at: www.visionofbritain.org.uk

The digitised maps will be presented with historical election results and statistics from the start of more complete records in 1832 all the way through to 1974. The geo-referenced maps will reveal new insights into political life with links to overlays, vectoring and other useful data to show changing political and administrative boundaries, political landscapes and parish to constituency relationships.

This project is part of a £22m digitisation programme being managed by JISC with funding from HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) to make available a wide range of heritage and scholarly resources of national importance, including sound, moving pictures, newspapers, maps, images, cartoons, census data, journals and parliamentary papers for use by the UK further and higher education communities.
For more information about the project please contact:

Paula Aucott or Alexandra Nicholls
University of Portsmouth
GBHGIS Project
Tel. 023 9284 2500
Email: gbhgis@port.ac.uk 
www.port.ac.uk/research/gbhgis

For more information about digitisation & scanning:
Beverley Dodd
Digital Library & DCS Manager,
Birmingham City University
Tel. 0121 331 5286
Email: dcs@bcu.ac.uk
www.bcu.ac.uk/dcs

For further information please contact Birmingham City University Media Relations Office on 0121 331 6738, email press@bcu.ac.uk or out of hours on 07967 271 532.

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