Transcription projects

View Transcription project results / work-in-progress

Map Transcription Projects

From February - May 2022, we initiated a set of new collaborative projects to transcribe features and text from maps. We have gathered all of the placenames from the Roy Military Survey maps of Scotland (1747-55), traced footpaths from Ordnance Survey six-inch to the mile maps of Scotland (ca.1900s), and gathered text from Ordnance Survey 25 inch to the mile mapping of Edinburgh.

Map Transcriptions 2022 - event

Watch our closing event held on Tuesday 8 November 2022 at 17.00 which looked at the impact and value of these projects, and thanked everyone who helped. The event included a welcome from Amina Shah, National Librarian at NLS, and then from 8 speakers who each looked at the value of the transcription projects from different perspectives:

• Roy Military Survey - placename transcriptions

  We are very pleased to report that all Roy Names, their accompanying Ordnance Survey names, and comments have been successfully reviewed and edited. We are very grateful to everyone who has helped us with this. Some checking and revision of names is still onging - updates are announced on the Roy Transcriptions Forum

  August 2022 The following ways of accessing the Roy Gazetteer are now available:

  • Roy Gazetteer information page
  • Search the Roy Names with a map
  • Browse all the Roy Names as a list
• Scotways Historic Footpaths Project

  November 2022 Work still in progress. We have traced over 114,000 footpaths, spanning over 38,000 miles across Scotland.

  We are planning to close this viewer for tracing new paths on Friday 2 December 2022. Further details on the Footpaths Forum.

  View these paths:

  • Paths transcription interface
  • Footpaths Side by side viewer (OS One-inch 1900s / Bartholomew 1900s)
  • Footpaths Side by side viewer (OS Six-Inch 1900s / OpenStreetMap)
  • Please read our Scotways Historic Footpaths Project Help page before beginning
• OS 25 inch Edinburgh Placenames Project

  October 2022 Following the successful recording of all 30,043 transcriptions in the first two weeks, further work has taken place to edit and revise the transcriptions to complete them. The regrouped transcriptions allow 21,950 place names and related information on real-world features to be searched and viewed:

  • Map Viewer and Search Interface
  • Map Viewer Help
  • Project Information - datasets, fields, tags, and data download links