[[File:Welches dam 1892 map (cleaned).png|thumb|Welches Dam, on the Old Bedford River, as seen on an 1892 map in the series used to compile the gazetteer. The coordinates of the first letter resolve in the GB1900 data to {{Coord|52.452096|0.158079|type:landmark_region:GB}} ]]
The '''GB1900''' project was a crowd-sourced initiative to create a gazetteer, released under an open licence, by transcribing and geolocating all the place names on the second edition ''County Series'' of six inch to one mile (i.e. 1:10,560) maps of Great Britain, published by Ordnance Survey between 1888 and 1914, and thus out of copyright.<ref name="Southall">{{Cite Q|Q58523394}}</ref><ref name="Aucott-1">{{Cite Q|Q81201270}}</ref><ref name="Aucott-2">{{Cite Q|Q104888322}}</ref> Almost 1,200 volunteers contributed.<ref name="Aucott-1" /> Subsequent research found that they were "motivated by personal interest in the maps, in places that held meaning for them, and in how places had changed."<ref name="Aucott-1" />
The project began as '''Cymru1900''' in October 2013 under the auspices of the National Library of Wales, the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, [https://www.peoplescollection.wales/ People's Collection Wales] and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, before being relaunched nationally as GB1900 in September 2016 using maps scanned by the National Library of Scotland.<ref name="Southall" /> The software was updated and hosted by the University of Portsmouth.<ref name="Aucott-1" /> Transcription was concluded in January 2018, with the launch of the gazetteer in July that year.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Collins |first=Rosemary |date=August 2018 |title=Volunteer Transcription Project Celebrated |url=https://www.discountmags.com/magazine/who-do-you-think-you-are-august-1-2018-digital/in-this-issue/17048 |journal=Who do You Think You Are? |page=10}}</ref><ref name="Evans">{{cite web |last1=Evans |first1=Hannah |title=GB1900 Project Launch: The Historically Open Gazetteer of Great Britain |url=https://wikimedia.org.uk/2018/08/gb1900-project-launch-the-historically-open-gazetteer-of-great-britain/ |publisher=Wikimedia UK |access-date=16 July 2023 |date=13 August 2018}}</ref>
Each placename was tagged with the WGS84 coordinates and Ordnance Survey National Grid reference of the position of the bottom-left of the first letter of its first word,<ref name="Aucott-2" /> and allocated a 24-character hexadecimal code,<ref name="Aucott-2" /> which could not begin with zero, as well as a shorter seven-digit sequential ID.<ref name="Aucott-2" /> <!-- These seven-digit IDs are resolvable as URIs in the form http://www.pastplace.org/gb1900/1474716 <ref name="Aucott-2" /> NOT WORKING AT TIME OF WRITING - CHECK LATER -->
The resulting data (excepting personal data about contributors) is available under a CC0 licence from the Vision of Britain website.<ref name="Aucott-2" /><ref name="VoB">{{cite web |title=Data Access |url=https://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/data/#tabgb1900 |website=Vision of Britain |access-date=15 July 2023}}</ref> The complete gazetteer (reconciled to resolve differences between transcribers and including modern place name equivalents and the corresponding modern parish and local authority names, as of 1991 in England and Wales and 2001 in Scotland<ref name="Aucott-2" />) and an abridged version of it (removing duplicated data for common features such as "F.P." for "footpath" and "W" for "well") are available under a CC by-sa licence from the same source.<ref name="VoB" /> The former has 2,552,460 entries and the latter 1,174,450.<ref name="Aucott-1" />
109,193 entries end with a space followed by "Road", "Street", "Lane", "Rd." or "St."<ref name="Aucott-2" /> The abridged gazetteer includes 1,617 entries for "Manor House", 1,496 for "Manor Farm", and 454 for "High Street".<ref name="Aucott-2" />
Data from the gazetteer is used by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and the National Library of Scotland,<ref name="Aucott-2" /> and is being incorporated into Wikidata.
== References == {{Wikidata property|P9284}} {{Reflist}}
== External links ==
* [https://visionofbritainblog.wordpress.com/tag/gb1900/ Project blog] * [https://data.nls.uk/data/map-spatial-data/gb1900/ National Library of Scotland project page]
Category:Ordnance Survey Category:Gazetteers Category:Crowdsourcing Category:Open content Category:2016 introductions