When visiting a website containing as many as 25,000 items of historical and cultural interest, it’s difficult to know where to begin. For me, as for many others I’m sure, the starting point would be the village where I live, the town where I studied or the city in which I was born.
Type the name of any city, town, village or parish in Wales in the Discover bar of the new People’s Collection Wales website and you’re almost certain to find items in the area. In doing so, you may come across one of the 5,200 images from Tirlun Cymru, The National Library of Wales’s topographical prints collection which has been digitised and contributed to the project.
You would also be able to view items from the People’s Collection on one of a selection of historical maps as well as the familiar satellite view. By using the drop-down menu in the corner of the map, a user can display and explore early editions of ordnance survey maps from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, which in themselves are a fascinating source of information about Wales’s past.
As well as providing an obvious place to begin foraging through the wealth of historical material on the People’s Collection website, geographical information associated with historical items can now be displayed in new ways through the development of mobile technology.
Items in The National Library of Wales’s collections, such as the 4,400 photographs in the John Thomas Collection, can be viewed digitally on a mobile device in the very place where one of the photographs was taken. Not only does is it a great way of providing access to archived material stored in the National Collections, but this also has great potential for promoting Welsh culture and heritage to visitors from other all over the world.
Having followed a quick and easy registration process, a user of the People’s Collection website can even create their own heritage trails to bring together items of interest and than map an itenerary from one item to the next. These trails can then be made available to the public and downloaded to a mobile devices. For the user who wishes to record their movements around parts of Wales, there is also a People’s Collection mobile phone application called ‘Trails Cymru’ which will record and send their trail to the website.
To see these exciting features on the People’s Collection website, click here.
Dafydd Tudur
Culturenet Cymru