Linking archival data to location: a case study at the UK National Archives

Abstract

Purpose -The National Archives (TNA) is the UK government's official archive. It stores and maintains records spanning over a thousand years in both physical and digital form. Much of the information held by TNA includes references to place and frequently user queries to TNA's online catalogue involve searches for location. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how TNA have extracted the geographic references in their historic data to improve access to the archives. Approach -To be able to quickly enhance the existing archival data with geographic information, existing technologies from Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR) have been utilised and adapted to historical archives. Findings -Enhancing the archival records with geographic information has enabled TNA to quickly develop a number of case-studies highlighting how geographic information can improve access to large-scale archival collections. The use of existing methods from the GIR domain and technologies, such as OpenLayers, enabled us to quickly implement this process in a way that is easily transferrable to other institutions. Practical implications -The methods and technologies described in this paper can be adapted by other archives to similarly enhance access to their historic data. Also the data-sharing methods described can be used to enable the integration of knowledge held at different archival institutions. Value -Place is one of the core dimensions for TNA's archival data. Many of the records that we hold make reference to place data (wills, legislation, court cases…) and approximately one fifth of users' searches involve place names. However, there are still a number of open questions regarding the adaptation of existing GIR methods to the history domain. This paper presents an overview over available GIR methods and the challenges in applying them to historical data.

Linked Data and Cultural Heritage

“…Universities were the most highly represented organisation type in this study. Nine National GLAM organisations were involved in the collected studies: the Biblioteca Nacional de España [21], the British National Archives [22], the National Audiovisual Archive of Finland [23], the National Library of Finland [24], the National Library of Latvia [25], the Royal Library of Belgium, [26], Bibliotheque Nationale de France [27], the National Library of Israel [28], and the National Library of Ireland [29]. This was the second most frequently represented organisation type.…”

Geo-Referencing and Mapping 1901 Census Addresses for England and Wales

“…For instance, Carrion et al [17] create a spatial database for medieval fiscal data in Italy by matching the place names to present-day geographies. Clough et al [18] summarise several sources of existing geocoded data assets for linking the UK National Archive's data to geographical locations. There are also cases which geo-reference historical data at the record level rather than at the aggregated level.…”

Historical Collaborative Geocoding

“…They are trapezoidal functions of time with values ranging from 0 (the source provides no information at this time) to 1 (geographical entities portrayed in the map are regarded as existing and tangible at this time). We rely on the pgSFTI 6 postgres extension to store and manipulate such temporal fuzzy information. For instance, Figure 2 illustrates the valid time of a map whose topographic survey started in year 1775, ended between and 1780 and which was engraved late 1780. and may produce low quality results (see Figure 3).…”