Paper short abstract:

At the turn of the 20th century the British War Office maintained a library of original, mostly manuscript maps covering large parts of the world. Conservation, cataloguing, digitisation and computer vision analysis is under way at the British Library to open up the archive to researchers worldwide.

Paper long abstract:

Around the turn of the 20th century the British War Office maintained a library of original, mostly hand-drawn maps covering large parts of the world where detailed and reliable surveys were not otherwise available. The maps were gathered from a rich variety of sources including military expeditions, boundary commissions, explorers, travellers, missionaries and spies, and they were used by the War Office for making and revising official printed products.

From sketch maps made by intelligence officers, through surveyors' field sheets to cartographers' fair drawings, most of the items are unique manuscripts that show regions from a European perspective immediately before and during the colonial era. The maps are now held at the British Library in the 'War Office Archive'.

With generous funding from Indigo Trust almost 2,000 maps covering large parts of eastern Africa have been conserved, catalogued and digitised, and around 1,300 sheets relating to western Asia are currently being digitised in work sponsored by the Qatar Foundation. A further 2,500 items relating to China have been catalogued.

In many cases the maps are unique sources of historical data, providing evidence of populations, settlements and ethnic regions, and describing land use, limits of vegetation, hydrology and much else. We are trialling automated transcription techniques to harvest this data in preparation for analysis by researchers.

Nick Dykes, Curator of Modern Maps at the British Library, will provide an introduction to the archive, and describe the work being done to make the archive available for research worldwide.