Collection Highlights
In the following sections colleagues and collaborators present their personal views on some favourite ADS resources.
Mapping Medieval Townscapes: a digital atlas of the new towns of Edward I
Stewart Waller
ADS Curatorial and Technical Officer
Since working at the ADS, I have been fortunate enough to work on a number of exciting projects that embrace some of the more interesting web technologies currently available. For example, working with Portals and Portlets for the CREE project and a facetted classification search engine that fuels the CIE Demonstrator and also working with distributed technologies, such as Z39.50 and web-services (see previous issues of ADS News). However, putting these research and development avenues to one side, my core responsibility of creating and preparing digital datasets for archive and dissemination hasn't gone without its fair share of 'interesting' development opportunities ... enter WebGIS.
The ADS has been archiving and disseminating GIS based data for some time, but until now, we have only been able to offer this as a zipped-up download ready to use on the users desktop system. The solution to this has been to set up an ESRI-based GIS server that allows a subset of GIS functionality to be presented over the web. In doing so, the digital archive can be enhanced by adding a greater depth of interactivity than can be achieved with downloadable datasets alone.
The first few ADS collections that this technology had been tried out on included the 'Early Medieval Monastic Cemetery at Llandough, Glamorgan' and 'Predicting the Location of Hominin Sites in Africa and Asia'. However, we have upgraded our WebGIS and we have also created a dynamic interface that allows us to integrate the WebGIS module inline with our standard catalogue web pages. In July 2006, 'Mapping Medieval Townscapes: a digital atlas of the new towns of Edward I' was the first collection to feature the new inline WebGIS interface. This resource derives from The Queen's University, Belfast 'Mapping the medieval urban landscape research project' which began in 2003 with two years funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. We present the data generated from this project as an interactive online atlas, allowing the user to jump between an interactive WebGIS module, full text discussions, and downloadable data featuring interpretive maps, images and datasets for each town.
The combination of a genuinely interesting topic, a rich dataset and the element of interactivity makes Mapping the Medieval Townscape the collection that, I would have to say, stands out from the rest.
Mapping the Medieval Townscape:
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/resources.html?atlas_ahrb_2005
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