OS200 Project to create free online resource for Ireland's historical Ordnance Survey maps and texts

A new website has been launched by the OS200 Project, a three-year project to gather historic Ordnance Survey (OS) maps and present them on a freely-accessible online resource. It is scheduled to complete in 2024, and will mark the bi-centenary of the Irish Ordnance Survey being founded.

Just as the original survey went further than just mapping the island, OS200 will go further than creating a digital home for the maps. It will also reconnect the First Edition 6-inch maps with the OS Memoirs, Letters and Name Books, the informative notes recorded by the first waves of surveyors as they recorded landscapes and localities, customs and antiquities, place names and more, pulling together all relevant material from their work into one online resource.

      Ireland was the first entire country to be mapped at 6" to a mile

The project seeks to reconstruct an ‘ethnography’ of the OS in Ireland, looking in detail at the movements of individuals, as well as their links with others, with informants and other OS personnel, studying the timing and geography of these movements and the unfolding of OS operations across Ireland during the late-1820s through into the 1830s.

Among the team are geographers, historians, linguists and computer scientists; it is led by Professor Keith Lilley at Queen’s University Belfast and Dr Catherine Porter at the University of Limerick.

Take a look around the website for more information about what we can expect from the site as the project progresses. Click the image, right.

OS200: Digitally Re-Mapping Ireland's Ordnance Survey Heritage is an Irish Research Council and Arts and Humanities Research Council co-funded project and is supported by the Royal Irish Academy, the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, the Digital Repository of Ireland, and the major place-name projects Logainm.ie and the Northern Ireland Place-Name Project (NIPNP).