This is a brief post to let you know that AddressingHistory may be “at risk” over the next few weeks due to refurbishment work being undertaken on the University of Edinburgh machine room.
The AddressingHistory site and this blog are likely to be entirely unavailable from 5th – 7th February (last weekend) and over the period from Friday 18th February to Monday 21st February. Apologies for the late notice of this work and for any inconvenience this may cause.
Just before the AddressingHistory Launch event we promised you some goodies – this is a brief update with directions on where to find those goodies!
An image of the AddressingHistory blog showing all of the new tweaks.
And we are still on the look out for guest blog posts from our first users of AddressingHistory – we’d love to hear what you think of it, what you have been researching or anything really interesting you’ve found out through the historical directories. Drop us an email (addressing.history@ed.ac.uk) if you would be interested in contributing.
Things have been getting really busy prior to the big AddressingHistory Launch event this week so we thought we would quickly let you know what we’ve been up to.
Publications
We were delighted to be featured on page 8 of the Herald newspaper yesterday (Monday 15th November).
Last month we were also featured, along with the excellent AskScotland project, in IS News: the Newsletter of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland.
You can find information about these and other articles about the project in our new publications area. Do let us know if you have written about AddressingHistory for your local history newsletter, genealogy magazine, etc. and we will be delighted to mention and link to it here.
Recent Presentations
Earlier this month Stuart attended the RunCoCo Community Collection Online Sustainability and Business Models workshop to give a short presentation on AddressingHistory and to hear about the other exciting projects in the JISC Developing Community Content Programme which we are part of.
In late October Nicola also gave a presentation on AddressingHistory, and how we have been using social media (like this blog), to the CILIPS Autumn Gathering in Dunfermline and was delighted to meet librarians from across Scotland many of whom took AddressingHistory flyers and posters for their libraries and local history groups. Do get in touch with us if you’d like to do the same.
Changes to this Website
In readiness for our launch of the AddressingHistory tool we have been adding and changing a few things around here. We have added two new pages for Presentations and Press.
The Presentations page lists and links to the presentations we have been giving on the project – including numerous mentions of our wonderful blog readers and community around the project. The Press page has been prepared for journalists, bloggers and others who want to write about the project. There are links here to information about the project, the project partners and our new collection of images associated with the project.
There are a few other smaller changes to the website:
You can view all of these changes on the site or see our annotated image below:
Previews of Forthcoming Attractions
Over the next few days we will also be adding:
We also hope to add some guest postings from our first users of AddressingHistory – we’d love to hear what you think of it, what you have been researching with it or anything really interesting you’ve found out through the historical directories. Do drop us an email (addressing.history@ed.ac.uk) if you would be interested in contributing.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been really delighted to see that lots of you have been reading the blog, following us on Twitter and feeding back your comments and enthusiasm for the project. We really appreciate the support and we thought that we could probably make a few additions to the website to make it more useful for you particularly while we are still developing the AddressingHistory tool.
So, we have added a new “How Do I Get Involved?” page where you will find a brief guide to what you can do to get involved in the project us and what you will be able to do with the tool when it is launched on the website. We hope you find this a useful addition and would welcome suggestions for any other information or resources you’d like to see here on the AddressingHistory website – or topics you’d like to see us blogging about.
A Quick Project Update
Development of the AddressingHistory tool is progressing well with our software engineer Joe hard at work extracting data from the digitised directories and trying to find the most successful ways to display and filter names, addresses and listings. We hope we’ll be able to bring you a guest post from Joe along with some screen shots of our very early test version some time soon so watch this space.
Welcome to the AddressingHistory blog!
We will be using this space to let you know about ongoing developments around the AddressingHistory project as we work, over the next few months, to build on online tool for letting you explore and georeference historical post office directory information from Edinburgh. This is information like the names associated with a particular address, directories of professions, and adverts for businesses.
You can find out more about the project on our About page and we would welcome your comments, suggestions and feedback on the project and updates to the blog. You can also become our fan on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
If you would like to know more about the project or have suggestions for the project team please drop us an email to: addressing.history@ed.ac.uk