Southall, Humphrey

English

Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)

17www.archives.org.uk
 MAPS ARC 
Alternative ways of indexing 
by geography
Many archives index their collection geographically to make records more accessible 
for local history. However, a recent survey by the UK 
Archives Discovery Network found great variation 
in working practices between archives. Some follow 
the recommendations of the National Council on 
Archives’ Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place 
and Corporate Names (1997) and index by the most 
relevant administrative unit, generally a historic parish; 
some index by less formal place; and some use a 
geographical coordinate or location. What are the pros 
and cons?
I created the Great Britain Historical GIS (Geographical 
Information System), and the web site A Vision of 
Britain through Time which accesses it. Our lottery 
funding was obtained with strong support from the 
National Register of Archives, and a central aim was 
to computerise the name authorities identi! ed in the 
NCA Rules. http://www.ncaonline.org.uk/materials/
namingrules.pdf
Uniquely, our database supports systematic cross-
walking between administrative units, places and 
locations.
Administrative units
The NCA Rules emphasised indexing by parish, and 
identi! ed Youngs ’Guide to the Local Administrative 
Units of England (1979 and 1991). Richards’ Welsh 
Administrative Territorial Units (1969) and the Index of 
Scottish Place Names from 1971 Census as authorities. 
We obtained permission to computerise Youngs 
and Richards, and also R. Che"  ns’ Parliamentary 
A visualisation of the ‘IsPartOf’ relationships, with dates, linking the parish of Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight, to higher-level districts, to its component manors, and 
to the component chapelries of Newport and St. Nicholas, as held in the GB Historical GIS based on information in Youngs’ Local Administrative Units and the 
Manorial Documents Register. NB this shows just 20 units out of 78,470. Thanks to Vojtech Kupca  for the graphic.
18 www.archives.org.uk
ARC MAPS 
Constituencies And Their Registers 1832-1996 (2005). 
We also drew on the gazetteer of counties, parishes 
and burghs created by the Scottish Archives Network. 
This information is best searched via our expert search 
interface: http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/units
The advantages of indexing by administrative units 
are ! rstly that they are corporate bodies which create 
records, and secondly that they are areas not points, 
so a limited set of terms indexes all possible locations 
and brings related records together. Indexing by parish 
provides a relatively detailed geographical partitioning, 
and the system of parishes has been much more stable 
over time than the many di# erent systems of districts.
Unfortunately, the names of administrative units will 
not always be familiar to users, and familiar names may 
mislead. Further, while parishes have been more stable 
than districts there have been substantial changes over 
time. Although parishes do partition up the country, 
archivists have not always had access to the necessary 
maps (A Vision of Britain can identify an ancient parish, 
or a registration district, from a postcode typed into 
the home page).
Places
While administrative units are de! ned in law, ‘places’ 
are simply locations people give names to. Their 
great advantage for a user interface is that they are 
how most people think about geography. Identifying 
a satisfactory controlled vocabulary of places is 
problematic, but technology now makes it easy to 
o# er cross-walking from places to administrative units 
or locations. The Ordnance Survey’s 1:50 000 Gazetteer 
has 259,080 entries, but the only sense in which it 
includes variants names is that some ‘names’ actually 
include ‘OR’. The Getty Information Institute’s Thesaurus 
of Geographical Names includes variants, but misses 
substantial settlements. The crowd-sourced GeoNames 
includes variant names and initially seems vast, but is 
stronger on the names of hotels in tourist areas than 
on British villages.
All these sources lack provenance, and include 
duplicate entries. We have worked hard to limit these 
problems in our own list of places. It is far smaller than 
the OS50K or GeoNames but our 16,000 or so ‘places’ 
include every place that gave its name to an Ancient 
Parish, to a Civil Parish in 1911, to a constituency or 
to most kinds of district, from ancient hundreds to 
modern local authorities.  Over 80,000 place-names are 
linked to these places, each with an attribution.
Another problem with ‘places’ is that it is hard to de! ne 
them as anything other than points. Many records 
relate to a whole county or even the whole country, 
which in a place-based system may make it very 
di"  cult to separate the records of a County Council 
from the local history of the county town.
Locations
Indexing by geographical coordinates would be 
useless in a traditional card catalogue. However, in a 
computerised system coordinates o# er precision, and 
easy identi! cation of geographically related records. 
The downside is that the accuracy may be spurious, 
in two ways. Firstly, archival documents rarely contain 
coordinates and old maps will often be topographically 
inaccurate. The geography in historical documents 
consists of place-names, and associating these with 
Although Carisbrooke the place is a village west of 
Newport, Isle of Wight, the parish of Carisbrooke 
at one time included most of Newport and a large 
surrounding area. ‘Historic parishes’ were not set 
in stone: Carisbrooke’s boundaries were revised 
in 1882, 1894 and 1933, and the map shows 
these changes. Boundary lines were researched 
from published administrative area maps and 
unpublished maps in the National Archives, and 
are shown here overlain on a 1940s New Popular 
Edition one-inch map.
19www.archives.org.uk
MAPS ARC 
coordinates often requires detailed knowledge of 
both geography and the historical forms of names. 
Coordinates are therefore contestable interpretations.
Secondly, holding coordinates is likely to mean 
holding points. It is relatively easy to modify a 
standard records management system to hold points 
as pairs of numbers, and equally easy to programme in 
functions that ! nd available records within a de! ned 
rectangle or within a de! ned radius from some point. 
The problem is that records, which relate to a large 
area, such as a district or county, have to be indexed 
via a single point. This problem is avoided if the 
computer system holds polygons as well as points, 
but adding that functionality to existing management 
systems is much harder. GIS software is about exactly 
this kind of functionality but can be very expensive 
and of course lacks all the other functionality archivists 
need.
Conclusion
Mainstream authorities on geographical information, 
without experience of historical sources or the 
requirements of records management, would almost 
certainly recommend storing coordinates not names. 
The same is probably even truer of your corporate 
people who have picked up a smattering of GIS 
concepts, but the result will often be catastrophically 
bad resource discovery.
All approaches to geographical indexing have 
signi! cant problems, and your best approach 
will depend on the collection type. I am sure 
of three points. Firstly, if you decide to index 
historical documents by location, you must treat 
the coordinates as interpretations and also retain 
the placenames. Secondly, you should distinguish 
between what you hold in your index and what you 
allow your users to search by, and the latter should 
include informal places. Thirdly, there are limits to 
how much geo-spatial functionality can be included 
in mainstream records management software, and 
e"  cient cross-walking between users’ search terms 
and the actual index, or to link collections, needs more 
specialised capabilities available as web services. We 
are very interested in discussing how our system could 
be used in this way.
Humphrey Southall
Department of Geography, University of Portsmouth
Tracks in Time
The Leeds Tithe Map Project 
The tithe maps and associated apportionment records cover 
the modern City.  They provide details of land ownership, land 
occupancy and land use between 1838 & 1861 and they represent 
the earliest systematic, large-scale cartographic record of the area.  
In an e# ort to improve access to Leeds’ tithe map collection, with 
funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the West Yorkshire Archives 
Service has undertaken a project remove physical, ! nancial and 
intellectual barriers to these important resources.
Although generally in good condition, several of the plans had 
become fragile and su# ered peripheral damage following many 
years of use. Some had accumulated a layer of coal dust due to 
previous exposure to poor storage conditions.  The collection 
has been conserved and captured digitally to provide free online 
access at www.tracksintime.wyjs.org.uk 
High-resolution scans have yielded top-quality digital surrogates 
of the maps, while data from the apportionments has been 
transcribed by volunteers and linked to the relevant tithe plots 
and townships.  Researchers can now interrogate the resource and 
obtain answers and display results to suit individual requirements. 
The user may query the database to ! nd a speci! c landowner, for 
instance, and be taken to the portion of the map once held by that 
person. Or they might assess land usage and highlight all orchards, 
woodland and other land types within a given area. 
For further information please email: tracksintime@wyjs.org.uk
Stefanie Davidson
West Yorkshire Archive Service
Use of RD/RT/10 with thanks to West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds


Alternative ways of indexing by geography

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Portsmouth University Research Portal (Pure)

Name not available