Curating Born-Digital Maps

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Notes

1 The following information reflects the author’s primary experience of digital spatial data and legal deposit in the United Kingdom over the last 25 years.

2 This guesstimate is partly due to the huge quantity of web-mapping and dynamic data that is not being archived in current systems as well as to the large amount of proprietary mapping that commercial publishers and libraries rarely archive.

3 The United Kingdom Web Archive (https://www.webarchive.org.uk/), for example, is unable to capture interactive mapping based on programming scripts.

4 Creative Commons, ‘No rights reserved’, https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/.

5 Open Knowledge Foundation, ‘Open data commons open database license (ODbL)’, https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/.

6 Paul Gooding, Melissa Terras and Linda Berube, Towards User-Centric Evaluation of UK Non-Print Legal Deposit: A Digital Library Futures White Paper (DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2019) (https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/scholcom/180/). Since The Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-Print Works) Regulations 2013, UK Statutory Instruments 2013, No. 777 (https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2013/777/made) are recent, the rival library and publisher communities continue to discuss their terms. Publishers are keen to avoid any legislative changes that could allow greater access to, or re-use of, data, harming their commercial interests.

7 Open Data Institute, ‘The UK’s geospatial data infrastructure: challenges and opportunities’ (2018), https://theodi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/2018-11-ODI-Geospatial-data-infrastructure-paper.pdf.

8 For further details see Guy McGarva, Steve Morris and Greg Janée, Preserving Geospatial Data (Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Series Report 09-01, May 2009); Steven P. Morris, ‘Preservation of geospatial data: the connection with open standards development’, in Preservation in Digital Cartography: Archiving Aspects, ed. Markus Jobst (Berlin and Heidelberg, Springer, 2011), 129–46.

9 These include the ISO Standard: Geographic Information—Metadata ISO 19115-1:2014 (Part 1: Fundamentals: https://www.iso.org/standard/53798.html), and ISO 19115-2:2019 (Part 2: Extensions for acquisition and processing: https://www.iso.org/standard/67039.html), which attempt to provide an authoritative international standard for geospatial metadata; and the European Infrastructure for Spatial Metadata in Europe (INSPIRE) metadata specifications (https://inspire.ec.europa.eu/document-tags/metadata), based on ISO 19115 and other appropriate ISO standards, which encourage European spatial-data harmonization and preservation. Within the United Kingdom, the Association for Geographic Information’s Geo-spatial Metadata Interoperability Initiative (GEMINI)(https://www.agi.org.uk/uk-gemini/) is also widely used.

10 There is a short glossary at the conclusions of the Forum with terms used in the essays. For a more complete glossary see GIS Dictionary on Wiki.GIS.Com—The GIS Encyclopedia (http://wiki.gis.com/wiki/index.php/GIS_Glossary).

11 Anita E. Locher, ‘Starting points for lowering the barrier to spatial data preservation’, Journal of Map & Geography Libraries 12:1 (2016): 28–51 (https://doi.org/10.1080/15420353.2015.1080781).

12 This variety can be seen with the changes to recommended geospatial preservation formats over the last decade, as illustrated by the Library of Congress’s Recommended Formats Statement, VII. GIS, Geospatial and Non-GIS Cartographic (https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/geo-carto.html). The ESRI shapefile is still widely used and supported, but there has been a growth of other preferred formats, including KML and GML, the ESRI file geodatabase, OGC GeoPackage, GeoJSON, and JSON-LD formats.

13 McGarva, et. al., Preserving Geospatial Data (see note 8). For example, the Ordnance Survey’s most detailed mapping (OS MasterMap) is supplied in an XML-based format, the Geography Markup Language (GML), and this often needs to be imported into an appropriate spatial database, as well as styled appropriately for presentation. For further details see Chris Fleet and Philip Hatfield, ‘Map collecting in the digital age: implementing non-print legal deposit in the UK Legal Deposit Libraries’, Alexandria 27:3 (2017): 188–97 (https://doi.org/10.1177/0955749017730712).

14 Chris Fleet, Understanding User Needs: A Case Study from the National Library of Scotland, Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Guidance Note, October 2022, http://doi.org/10.7207/twgn22-01.

15 David S. H. Rosenthal, Emulation & Virtualization as Preservation Strategies, LOCKSS Program, Stanford University Libraries (https://archive.org/details/Rosenthal-Emulation-2015).

16 Artefactual Systems and the Digital Preservation Coalition, Preserving GIS, Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Guidance Note, July 2021 (http://doi.org/10.7207/twgn21-16).

17 See, for example, the Bartholomew Archive at the National Library of Scotland (https://digital.nls.uk/bartholomew/). Christopher Fleet and Charles W. J. Withers, ‘Maps and map history using the Bartholomew Archive, National Library of Scotland’, Imago Mundi 62:1 (2009): 92–97 (https://doi.org/10.1080/03085690903319408).

18 Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, https://www.spatialni.gov.uk/. See Christopher Fleet, ‘Ordnance Survey digital data in UK Legal Deposit Libraries’, LIBER Quarterly 9:2 (1999): 235–43 (http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.7538); and Christopher Fleet, ‘The legal deposit of digital spatial data in the United Kingdom’, LIBER Quarterly 13:1 (2003): 28–38 (http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.7708).

19 The Legal Deposit Libraries (see note 6).

20 This more recent history to 2017 is described in Fleet and Hatfield, ‘Map collecting in the digital age’ (see note 13).