Background

The Great Britain Historical GIS (or GBHGIS) is a spatially-enabled database that documents and visualises the changing human geography of Great Britain, mainly over the 200 years since the first census in 1801. The project is currently based at the University of Portsmouth, and is the provider of the Vision of Britain through Time (VoB) website.⁶  The project is involved in the digitisation of a wide range of geographic and demographic data that are included in the GBHGIS.⁷

The objective of the project is to make the data available to the widest possible range of users through a variety of channels and encourage their reuse in different contexts. For instance, the digitised and compiled data may be either downloaded from UKDA (the UK Data Archive)⁸

and EDINA’s (Edinburgh Data and Information Access)⁹  UKBORDERS (United Kingdom Boundary Outline and Reference Database for Education and Research Study)¹⁰

service or may be viewed on the Vision of Britain website.

Key content features

• Data intensive content (data and data compilations)

• Maps and graphics

• Material from the 19th and 20th centuries (material in the public domain)

Key value gains

• Through the VoB service the visibility and usability of data, especially for non-expert users, is increased

• By allowing the downloading of data in raw form (through UKDA and EDINA UKBORDERS), it is possible to link them with other related services (eg archives, other GIS services) and thus achieve their maximum utilisation

• Different channels of making the data available serve educational and research objectives

• As the access to the data becomes easier, added cultural and historical value is provided to nonprofessionals (eg amateur local historians, lay users)

• The availability of data in different forms could potentially create a market for individuals interested in family and local history or location-sensitive services

Rights ownership and obtained permissions

• Most of the works used for the project are currently out of copyright, although some of the works will be protected by Crown Copyright

• There are a variety of copyright owners within the VoB project. These include:

• The copyright ownership of Census data from 1961 to 2001 belongs to National Statistics, for England and Wales, and to the General Register Office, for Scotland. These agencies also supplied the VoBs with detailed maps of modern census reporting areas

• The copyright in some of the historical photographs used within the VoB belongs to English Heritage

• The copyright in the text interpreting statistical themes belongs to Humphrey Southall 2003, 2004

• The copyright in the maps created by the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain belongs to L. Dudley Stamp/Geographical Publications Ltd, while the scanned images of these maps, for England and Wales, to the Environment Agency/Defra, and for Scotland to the Great Britain Historical GIS

• The data used for the project have been collected for a period of about ten years. In this period, the data collection and compilation have been funded by a variety of projects and the individuals collecting and compiling the data have been employed by different academic institutions. As a result, there are potentially a number of rights holders for the data

• Issues of institutional ownership and transfer of rights have been resolved in the following ways:

• By ensuring that the Principal Investigator,¹¹

  ie the person heading the research project, obtains a licence from the academic researchers who hold copyright in the transcriptions

• By assigning or licensing all copyright to an organisation¹²

  that exists irrespective of any project transformations

Terms of access and use

The content found on the VoB website is not licensed to the end-user under a specific licensing scheme. It only contains detailed copyright notices regarding each of its components.¹³ Consequently, the use of the content is governed by the rules of fair dealing as defined in the relevant legislation, ie content can be used for non-commercial research or private study.¹⁴

The content made available through the UKDA and EDINA BORDERS services is licensed under the Census End User Licence (EUL).¹⁵

The key terms of this licence agreement are as follows:

• Data can only be used for personal, research, educational and non-commercial purposes

• Registration is a requirement for using the content

• The data cannot be further disseminated

• Personal information must be kept confidential

• Attribution and acknowledgement is made in accordance with the terms and conditions of the licence

⁶ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Britain_Historical_GIS

⁷ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded early development work on the GBHGIS web-based mapping tools, under JTAP project JTAP 1/320, ‘Authoring methods for electronic atlases of change and the past’, and contributed to boundary mapping and data entry

⁸http://www.data-archive.ac.uk

⁹http://edina.ac.uk

¹⁰ http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/description

¹¹ Professor Humphrey Southall

¹² According to the VoB website - http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/footer/doc_text_for_title.jsp?topic=credits&seq=4  - ‘The resource as a whole is © Great Britain Historical GIS Project 2004’, the GBH GIS being a network of collaborating academic researchers.

¹³ http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/footer/doc_text_for_title.jsp?topic=credits&seq=4 

¹⁴ The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded early development work on the GBHGIS web-based mapping tools, under JTAP project JTAP 1/320, ‘Authoring methods for electronic atlases of change and the past’, and contributed to boundary mapping and data entry

¹⁵ http://www.data-archive.ac.uk/conditions/data-access

Links accessed April 2012.