Chief bibliographer Kintija Strazdiņa Cartography division, Special Collections Department National Library of Latvia
Workshop “MAPS IN LIBRARIES 2019”
This report documents the details of my recent visit to Graduiertenschule für Ost- und Südosteuropastudien, Regensburg, Germany. I visited Regensburg to take part in a workshop “Maps in Libraries 2019” which took place over 13/14 of March 2019 and was organized by Leibniz-Institut für Ost- und Südost- europaforschung. “Maps in Libraries 2019” was dedicated to map collections in the digital environment and was first of its kind held by Leibnitz Institute. As a basis for this workshop was the institute's experience in developing “GeoPortOst : Thematic and Hidden Maps of Eastern and Southeastern Europe” - a project, that resulted in a new browser with over 3000 maps dating from the 16th to the 19th century. My personal goal for this seminar was gaining more experience by listening to specialists from different fields: map holders - librarians and archivist, developers of platforms related to digital map storage and processing, as well as scientists who are facing the use of cartographical material during their research. As a representative of the National Library of Latvia at this seminar, I hoped to gain an understanding of what is needed to ensure the functioning of a modern and sustainable digital map collection. The workshop lasted for two days and was structured in 4 sessions with a total of 19 speakers. The first day was devoted to the experience of libraries and archives in digitizing and georeferencing collections of maps, and the possible use of the created digital collections. The first panel consisted of representatives from three countries - the US, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, who talked about their work on making digital map collections. Marcy Bidney from American Geographical Society Library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee talked about the history of digitalization in US libraries in three stages. In the current, third, stage of digitization the main focus is the availability of maps, which has led to discussions on the role of the library and the librarian. If material preservation has been considered as the main function of the library so far, the emphasis now is on user service and ability to adapt / refer to the needs of readers. Marco van Egmond from Utrecht University Library presented digitalization related projects going on in the Netherlands, presenting the crowdsourcing methods currently used in different institutions. This presentation provided an insight into the collaboration and systematic work of various institutions. At the end of the first panel, Christopher Fleet gave a wide-ranging presentation on the creation, management and increase of potential use of geo-referenced maps using examples of his work at the National Library of Scotland. Christopher introduced a multitude of projects where Scottish National Library maps are used as a basis for other user applications, thus not only promoting the collection of maps, but also financially maintaining the digital map browser, allowing it to be developed further. The second panel was dedicated to georeferencing through crowdsourcing. The session was launched by Roman Walt from ETH Zürich. He explained his experience in building a number of crowdsourcing communities. Martjin Stroms from Leiden university library shared the experience of setting up working groups for students and pensioners trained in the georeferencing process to provide a volunteer community. Both speakers stressed the importance of working with community building - to understand who will be the target audience and how to reach / interest it and when that is done - how to keep the community informed about news. The last two presentations of the day reflected not only the use of digital communities in map georeferencing, but focused on the use of data after the process - the technical side of the creation of browsers and the problems that come with it. Andeas Weber from Landesarchiv Baden‐Württemberg Stuttgart provided an insight into a collection of archive maps, which is slightly different from the library map collections, which made it possible to understand the problem of georeferencing maps that do not always link the information displayed to a specific location. The final presentation of the panel from Dominica Stoltz from SLUB Dresden focused on map browser management and technology issues.
Conclusions after the first day: ● the digital collection should be looked upon as an ad for the entire existing collection - it is important not to follow the belief that everything you need can be found on the internet, thus encouraging readers to come to the library; ● it would be sustainable to create a joint digital system for the Latvian memory institutions (archives, museum collections, universities, etc.), thus making it easier to create crowdsourcing communities; ● an important way of promoting a collection of maps is to make it possible for maps in the browser to be used as a basis for other user applications; ● when creating a digital portal, it is important to create it with open source software so that it can be constantly developed;
The second day began with a speech by Petr Pridal, in which he announced news about Klokan Technologies, a company specializing in online map publishing (Old Maps Online), crowdsourcing georeferencing tools (Georeferencer ) and open source applications (MapTiler ). After the speech, the third panel of the seminar began, devoted to the various possibilities of using digitized maps. The first speaker was Alexey Forlov from the Russian Academy of Sciences, who shared the experience of creating a georeferencing system for a specific study. Rainer Simon from the Austrian Institute of Technology Vienna presented a platform for semantic map annotation - Recogito , within which it’s possible to annotate both text and image. This is most useful for creating place-name databases and for identifying place-names in digital texts or table data. At the end of the session, researchers from Koç University in Istanbul presented their work on a paper in which they used historical maps and texts to compare the 16th century Ottoman Empire military logistics to the 19th century transport infrastructure in south-eastern Europe. The presentation focused on the information obtained from a study of maps. It was useful to learn that information about what maps might be useful for their research was originally obtained through the Old maps online browser, which further pointed to the presence of the required maps in their respective library collections. Marta Kužma of the Military University of Technology in Warsaw started of the fourth and final panel by presenting her study of how easy it is to find cartographic information in traditional library catalogs in Poland. The theme launched by Martha was complemented by the next presentation from the Moravská zemská knihovna v Brně in which Pert Žabička and Miloš Pacek told the listeners about cataloging and displaying tools for ancient maps and map series. The Moravian Library has chosen to display the series of maps visually, without georeferencing, using GitHub. This set of presentations started the discussion that searching for maps in classical catalogs is often difficult and does not provide a complete description of the materials, as well as the lack of a unified global system for describing map metadata. As third in this panel was Olga Zhlobinskaya from the Russian Presidental Library in St. Petersburg, where there is no separate collection of maps, but they are all held in different collections. This presentation complemented the view that user experience is clearly hampered by having to search for cartographic material without a browser system. Gethin Rees, GIS Research Curator at the British Library, gave the ending presentation of the seminar. His presentation focused on the use of geospatial data and the challenges related to it. The world has long been talking about the growing role of GIS in humanities research, Gethin Rees gave great examples of how to use GIS beyond the geographic approach.
Conclusions after the second day: ● an easy-to-use browser helps both people who have not fully understood what they are looking for exactly and the researchers who work on a particular topic because it is not only easier to review the digital part of map collection but it also works as an advertisement for the non-digitized part of the card collection; ● collaboration with Old Maps Online, etc. would help promote the library map collection beyond national borders; ● as proven by examples from other countries, maps and GIS can be used by researchers from different fields; in the future, the cartography division at National Library of Latvia should think about how to address a wider audience of researchers.
The development of digitization of the map stock contributes to access to resources. Digitizing, georeferencing and creating a high-quality map browser makes maps and the information in them more accessible and promotes the use of map collections. It is possible to connect a georeferenced map with information from other sources, thus it becomes an indispensable and important research tool. Investing work in the existing NLL map browser would promote the use of online map collections and other available services in the reading room. Considering that displaying information on a map makes it more understandable, it would be possible to integrate the map browser to represent other collections of the library over time. This kind of collaboration between different library units would be useful for all sides: people would find out about the map browser and map collections from their research in other collections and in the meantime other collections would have a functional browser. In closure, I would like to thank Bibliothek & Information International (BII), National Library of Latvia and the State Culture Capital Foundation of Latvia for supporting my trip and allowing me to gain more experience in the field of map librarianship.