Further Website Tweaks

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Dec 082010
 

Just before the AddressingHistory Launch event we promised you some goodies – this is a brief update with directions on where to find those goodies!

One of the new AddressingHistory HTML badges.

An image of the AddressingHistory blog showing all of the new tweaks.

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.

AddressingHistory Launch Programme Announced

 Project Updates  Comments Off on AddressingHistory Launch Programme Announced
Nov 082010
 

We have just confirmed the programme for our official AddressingHistory Launch which is taking place on Wednesday 17th November. We will be celebrating local Scottish history with a range of speakers and invited attendees with particular interests and expertise in genealogy and local, social and Scottish history.

We will be writing up the event here on the AddressingHistory blog (in as close to real time as available wifi/3G networks allow) and we will be posting videos from the event a few weeks afterwards. You can also join us via Twitter using the #AHlaunch hashtag.

The Programme

We are absolutely delighted that we have speakers from a huge variety of Scottish history projects and digital resources and we think that the videos from the day will be fantastic viewing!

  • Welcome – Cate Newton (Director of Collections and Research, National Library of Scotland)
  • Introduction – Professor. Robert Morris (Emeritus Professor of Economic and Social History , University of Edinburgh)
  • AddressingHistory presentation and launch – Stuart Macdonald (AddressingHistory Project Manager, EDINA) & Nicola Osborne (AddressingHistory Project Officer & Social Media Officer, EDINA))
  • Visualising Urban Geography project – Professor. Richard Rodger (Professor of Economic and Social History, Univ. of Edinburgh)
  • Statistical Accounts of Scotland – Dr Helen Chisholm (EDINA)
  • NLS Digitised Historic Mapping – Chris Fleet (Senior Map Curator, National Library of Scotland)
  • Tobar An Dualchais – Kenny Beaton (School Of Celtic and Scottish Studies, Univ. of Edinburgh)
  • Internet Archive digitisation project(s) – Lee Hibberd /Ines Mayfarth (National Library of Scotland)
  • Wrap Up followed by demonstrations

We will be making a small number of tickets available to blog readers so do keep an eye out for an update on that shortly.

If you would like to show your support for the project we are also going to be making various HTML badges available when we launch. If you’d like to be one of the first sites to feature one of these then email us at: addressing.history@ed.ac.uk.

We would also love to hear what you plan to do with AddressingHistory or, if you’ve been using our preview version, any interesting stories and comments about what you’ve already been exploring. Email us or leave us a comment linking to your blog postings, videos, pictures etc.

Project Update: The Preview is Here!

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Sep 302010
 

Things have been a little quiet on the blog recently as we have been busy working away on the AddressingHistory tool.

If you signed up for our Preview then you should have already received an email inviting you to test out AddressingHistory (please get in touch if you asked to join the preview but have not yet heard from us) and you can send us your feedback here. Feedback from our previewers so far has been very positive and we are excited about the full launch – details of which will be coming soon (you can also sign up to be alerted to the launch, or join our mailing list)

In preparation for our launch we would be really interested in hearing how you hope to use AddressingHistory to find out more about your area, your ancestors or historical residents or businesses that might have special meaning for you. Please let us know about your interest in the project and the history of Scotland in the comments below or drop us an email with your story as we’d love to do some special blog postings on these stories and the information available in AddressingHistory. Look out for a great guest blog post from Chris Fleet, of the National Library of Scotland, on the history of Causewayside that we hope will inspire you to share your stories!

Finally, for our Australian readers, there will be an opportunity to grab a flyer for yourself or your local history or genealogy group over the next few weeks as Chris Paton, a Scottish history and genealogy expert who runs the Scottish GENES blog, is taking some of our flyers on his Scottish Research Roadshow in October which includes appearances at the History and Genealogy Expo Sydney 2010.

Remember if you would like further information on the project or would like us to send some posters and flyers to you, your local history group or genealogy community then please get in touch.

How Do You Get Involved With AddressingHistory?

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Jun 112010
 

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.