Historical maps as a multifaceted LOUD resource

Abstract

Maps produced by the Survey of India were created as a tool of British imperial expansion in the 18th to mid-20th centuries, but have incidentally been found to document the locations of thousands of elevated mound features of archaeological importance. The availability and access to collections of these historic maps remains challenging. This is due to the distributed nature of their storage across multiple hard-copy repositories, as well as the lack of a system other than manual comparison to identify the overlaps and differentials across library holdings. This paper explores the issues encountered when working to follow best practice in meeting the aims of 1) producing an open access, interoperable resource that links across various repositories; 2) meeting the heritage management aim of extracting, analysing and recording geospatial archaeological data and 3) providing geospatial search capability for the map sheets. We explore how historical maps as data objects might adhere to Linked Open Useable Data (LOUD) principles in their generation, curation, analysis and dissemination. This case study stems from a collaboration between the Mapping Archaeological Heritage in South Asia (MAHSA) project and two UK Legal Deposit Libraries. Considering the cataloguing and research needs of the participating organisations, we present a proof-of-concept structure built on top of the open source software platform Arches, as the main centre piece of the technology stack. This uses the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) to re-present high-resolution images of paper map sheets held in diverse collections worldwide.