Digital Preservation of the UK’s Topographic Heritage

thinkWhere has gone live with a system that will deliver tangible benefits for the 6 UK Legal Deposit Libraries (LDLs). The new system will help ensure the LDLs can grow the nation's published digital mapping output, and also protect and preserve it for future use under Legal Deposit legislation. UK Legal Deposit legislation requires publishers to deposit printed and digital material published in the country for access at LDL facilities.

The latest project involved further development and enhancement of a thinkWhere solution originally developed for the libraries in 2013 (resulting in the Geospatial Data Application and Services (GDAS) system). The system provides controlled access to digital map data, and only from the libraries’ Reading Rooms. Reading Rooms are located in The British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford, the University Library, Cambridge, and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.

With a number of tools for viewing and comparing maps from different epochs, the GDAS system was initially set up to provide access to annual snapshots of Ordnance Survey Mastermap topographic data. Ordnance Survey GB data held in the GDAS system goes back to 1998, with large scale Ordnance Survey Northern Ireland data to 2004. However, recent changes to legal deposit legislation found the LDLs requiring further development and expansion of the GDAS system to facilitate the deposit of data from any number of UK map publishers, in addition to the data published by Ordnance Survey.

The LDLs are the very latest customers to embrace and benefit from thinkWhere’s innovative new geospatial platform “theMapCloud”. An Open Source cloud solution, theMapCloud currently offers Platform as a Service (PaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) capabilities. A flexible and scalable solution, theMapCloud is pivotal to the future strategy for thinkWhere products, services and solutions.