My Digital Lives colleague Jamie Andrews, responsible at the library for literary manuscripts, sometimes sends me web links to online fiction that makes use of digital technology in interesting ways. A case in point is We Tell Stories, produced in association with Penguin. The story begins at St Pancras Railway Station, and then follows the principal character by means of Google Maps to the British Library and beyond. It is addictive: not at all conducive to efficient research project management.
Moving from fiction to nonfiction, here is an image of a GPS track that I made using a handheld GPS receiver.
At first glance it might look like the route taken by someone who has lost his or her way after a British Library mingle event, but in fact it depicts the path taken as my family and I strolled through an open air museum in April - the National History Museum of Wales at St Fagans. Many original buildings from all over Wales have been carefully dismantled and reconstructed at the museum's parkland.
Here is a slightly more detailed view of our track.
If one laid it over a detailed topographical map of the complex, it would be possible to surmise which exhibits we visited: even though it is near the limit of the precision of the consumer GPS.
Increasingly digital photographs are being created with time and place metadata embedded within them. Clearly this will be of great potential benefit to future archivists of digital photographs as well as raising some issues of privacy. Not only is GPS functionality being added to handheld devices such as the Blackberry, others such as the iPhone are using a location system based on the cell phone network. Many people will therefore have access to the potential to record their location.
We are exploring the integration of GPS information with digital photographs as part of the Digital Manuscripts Project at the British Library. Here are some pictures to whet your appetite (© Jeremy Leighton John all images including tracks). ![]()

