Cate Newton of The National Library of Scotland at The Addressinghistory Launch Event

My name is Cate Newton and it is my great pleasure to welcome you all here to the National Library this afternoon. The National Library is delighted to host this event and to be a formal partner in the AddressingHistory project. AddressingHistory is important to the Library in furthering various of our strategies. For at least a decade the National Library has been actively digitizing our collections to widen access to them and to make them available on the web we've now got a very wide range of material in our digital gallary including the Hague photographs of the First World War some early Gaelic book collections the Gutenberg Bible Jacobite prints and broadsides early books of Scottish songs, and photographs of the South Side of Edinburgh amongst many others. And we also now have over twenty thousand maps of Scotland freely available as high resolution zoomable images on the website. The Library's also very keen to collaborate and to work with external partners AddressingHistory brings these widening access and building relationships strategies together by allowing our digitized content specifically Post Office directories and geo- referenced maps to be made available in exciting new ways using technology developed by EDINA. As we hope to show you this afternoon the AddressingHistory website represents an important application . It demonstrates a new way of using geographical technologies to link together primary information resources as well as promoting crowd-sourcing techniques as a way of building and improving on those primary resources. As our directories and maps continue to be digitized we hope to build on the AddressingHistory project by extending its content in time and space as well as utilizing its features and strengths in other related projects, some of which we're also going to hear about this afternoon