Hi everybody,

A quick update on the campaign to find all the maps (and ground plans) in the British Library's one-million-image Flickr stream scanned from old 19th century books.

This is of particular relevance to the Wikimaps project, because as soon as we've tagged all the maps and plans on Flickr, the BL will start georeferencing them with its own loyal volunteers, so that in the new year we should be able to upload all the maps to Commons, complete with a full set of georeferencing control points.

The good news is that in the first ten days, we've gone through the Flickr pages for half the books scanned for the collection, and tagged 11,000 maps and plans, ready for georeferencing.

See latest status here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curator_collection/map_tag_status

The bad news is that the effort so far has almost all been made by about ten people, who are now starting to tire.  So the project desperately needs more help, if we're to push on and get all the old maps found.

As the status page above shows and links, a lot of progress has been made with many parts of the index; but some other parts -- for example, index pages of books relating to the United States, and to Scandinavia -- still remain almost untouched.

What's needed is very simple.  As explained on the status page, it's just to go through each entry that has a pink "Untagged maps?" templated link, tag all the images that are maps, then remove the templated link from the list on the wikipage.

This should produce an excellent resource for the Wikimaps project.  But first we need to identify the maps, so the British Library can georeference them.

So if anyone on this list knows anyone who might be interested to help, or if anyone could organise a group to help, please do let them know (or even please do help with a bit of tagging yourself).

It would be so good to get all the maps and charts and plans found in this collection.  But it's going to need a bit more help.

All best,

   James.

_______________________________________________
Maps-l mailing list
Maps-l@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/maps-l