Presentation at the LIFE-SHARE Project's Digitisation Collaboration Colloquium, in Sheffield, March 2011. Uploaded with permission.

1. LIFE-SHARE 29-03-2011 Colloquium http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/ http://addressinghistory.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ Nicola Osborne AddressingHistory Project Officer EDINA Social Media Officer http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/

2. Supported by… Project focused on 3 volumes of Post Office Directories (PODs): 1784-5; 1865; 1905-6) Historic maps georeferenced by NLS PODs digitised by NLS in conjunction with the Internet Archive Public domain

3. Project Team: Stuart Macdonald, Project Manager Nicola Osborne, Project Officer Joe Vernon, Software Engineer Project Partners

4. What are the Post Office Directories and Why do they matter?

5. 1865 1905 Who would live in a road like this?

6. Post Office Directories were published annually and accompanying maps were updated more frequently than the Ordnance Survey especially in rural areas. They contain names, addresses, profession and professional addresses as well a historical adverts. They therefore offer a point of connection from birth, marriage and death certificates, to the Census to family letters, to business records. They also include an unusual amount of information on women who were not recorded in many other resources at this time. Over 700 directories have been digitised by the National Library of Scotland and made available for free online.

7. To build up our community whilst AddressingHistory was developed we set up a very active project blog and social media presences

8. Content included updates on the project, items about upcoming events around local and family history and invited guest blog posts

9. Facebook helped us to reach new audiences and spread project news shared virally

11. Share new blog posts, videos, images

12. Retweet other interesting history and genealogy resources

13. Get word out about the launch (#AHLaunch)

14. Recruit guest bloggers

17. Direct contact with local and family history organisations and bloggers

19. Locations have been detected from addresses but users can (and do) report or correct errors from the search page On 17th November 2010 we launched AddressingHistory

20. In addition to viewing results users can download data in standardised formats 1 id, forename, surname, profession, address, category, googlelat, googlelon, crowdlat, crowdlon 184338, Charles, Brims, , 15 South College street, Edinburgh, Scotland, , 5

21. We also launched an API to enable mashups!

22. 50 Invited Guests and Stakeholders and blog readers attended our launch event… The API was featured and publicised on ProgrammableWeb

23. We encourage AH users to share their enthusiasm!

24. We sought coverage throughout the project: presentations at IASSIST, OKScotland, RepositoryFringe and the CILIPS Autumn Gathering. We attended Perth 800 and will attend the Scottish Association of Family History Societies Conference 2011. Articles: Scottish Genealogist: Quarterly Journal of the Scottish Genealogy Society, The Herald, Border Telegraph, Bristol and Avon Family History Society Journal, Family History Monthly, Practical Family History, Discover my Past Scotland, ALISS Quarterly

25. More Information AddressingHistory Web Tool: http://addressinghistory.edina.ac.uk/ AddressingHistory Blog: http://addressinghistory.blogs.edina.ac.uk/ Contact Us: Addressing.history@ed.ac.uk @addresshistory Image Credits http://www.flickr.com/photos/dawgbyte77/3058355981/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/napfisk/4762810231/ All other images by AddressingHistory (http://flickr.com/photos/addressinghistory)