War Office Archive

War Office Archive

These datasets relate to maps and documents held at the British Library in the War Office Archive, a collection of over 14,000 mostly unique, hand-drawn items that were originally kept by the British War Office between c.1880 and 1940 for use in compiling printed maps over large parts of the world. The items came from a variety of sources, including military surveyors, explorers, missionaries and spies, and provide a unique insight into the world during the colonial era. They yield the names of historical settlements and regions, descriptions of historical land use, topography and vegetation, and notes of ethnographic, military or administrative context. We would appreciate it if users could read our Ethical terms of use guide before reusing our War Office Archive datasets: https://www.bl.uk/help/ethical-terms-of-use. We'd love to hear what you've done or made with the data, so please email us at digitalresearch@bl.uk.

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    Digitised maps of the former British East Africa
    (2017)
    Dykes, Nick
    This dataset comprises 581 images of maps of the former British East Africa created between 1890 and 1940 and a spreadsheet of related catalogue records. All Open Government Licence v1.0 (OGL). A user-friendly geographical search index of the maps is available on Google Maps. These JPEG files were converted from TIFF files using Irfan view. They relate to maps of the former British East Africa held in the British War Office (1890-1940).
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    Text extracted from digitised maps of eastern Africa circa 1880-1940
    (2020-05-04)
    Dykes, Nick
    This dataset comprises an Excel spreadsheet of text extracted from almost 2,000 digital images of maps and documents held in the War Office Archive, covering a large part of eastern Africa between c.1880 and 1940. The items were catalogued and digitised with generous funding from Indigo Trust. The harvested text includes names of historical settlements and ethnic regions in eastern Africa, descriptions of historical land use, topography and vegetation, and notes of ethnographic, military or administrative context. Auto-extraction of the text was carried out using the Google Vision API. The spreadsheet provides text found, confidence scores from Google Vision relating to transcription accuracy, locations of text on each image, and links to a geographical search interface that enables access to the relevant images and catalogue records hosted on the BL website. A large number of erroneous text results were cleaned from the full set of Google Vision responses, but some errors remain - for example, where individual characters have been incorrectly transcribed within words, though the words themselves should still be identifiable. In addition, not all words appearing on the maps were captured.
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