The waiting is finally over! The AddressingHistory team are pleased to announce that the remodeled AddressingHistory crowdsourcing tool is now available. We have added six further Post Office Directories to the collection for the years 1881 and 1891 (to coincide with census years) and extended the geographic coverage to include the cities of Aberdeen and Glasgow in addition to Edinburgh.

The tool itself has been refashioned with refined parsing capabilities incorporated. Searches can now be made across those instances of records with multiple addresses, those records with multiple addresses also being editable. Spatial searching can now also be conducted using a bounding box facility and the searching of professions has been enhanced by assigning Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes to Professions.

As mentioned in a previous blog post you can now explore an “Augmented Reality” version of AddressingHistory using your iPhone or Android device.  Currently this is for Edinburgh only but plans are afoot to extend this to other geographies within the web tool.

In addition to new features and functionality it is now possible for requests to be made for a new POD to be added to AddressingHistory.  Once a request for a new POD has been made we can either provide assistance in using our POD parser (this requires some time and technical knowledge) to convert the requested POD, or we will add that POD to our priority list for future AddressingHistory development.

We are currently evaluating possible business models for sustainability and would like to hear of any ideas or initiatives that could feed into this exercise.

Please get in contact and let us know what you think.

Stuart Macdonald
AddressingHistory Project Manager