The map viewer uses OpenLayers 4.6.5 for the map interface, JQuery to provide filtering and a date range selector, and a MapTiler georeferenced mosaic of historical maps of Great Britain from ca. 1900.
It was created by Chris Fleet and Rachel Dishington during a 3-month placement in the National Library of Scotland from May – August 2019. The placement took place during Rachel's PhD project at the University of Edinburgh on ‘Engineering ‘Modern’ Scotland: The Stevenson Maps and Plans and Scotland’s Built Infrastructure, c.1800–c.1900’. The PhD was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Scottish Cultural Heritage Consortium. It is a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership between the University of Edinburgh and the National Library of Scotland.
There were three main aims in creating the map interface:
- To allow the Stevenson maps covering a particular place to be quickly discovered by clicking on the place.
- To allow easy filtering of the maps by subject and date.
- To allow the different geographic extents of the maps to be clearly visible.
For a full description of this project, see the project web pages on Geocoding the Stevenson Maps and Plans of Scotland and Setting up a web-mapping interface for the Stevenson Collection. All the specific OpenLayers code for this application is in the /scripts/index.js file, which has been commented to explain specific functions.
View the Stevenson Maps and Plans of Scotland web resource.