Impact report on ‘A Vision of Britain through Time’ 2004-10: investigating the current use and impact of a popular digital resource for local history research

The website A Vision of Britain through Time brings together geographical surveys of Britain, including every census from 1801 to 2001 and a large library of historic maps. It was built by the Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at the University of Portsmouth and originally launched with National Lottery funding in 2004. JISC funded major extensions to content and a re-design in 2007-9, but the site was still designed mainly to meet the needs of local historians. This report summarises usage to date. Because the site is open access, heavily used and systematically linked to Google AdSense and Google Analytics, we can report on income generation and on what users do with the site in great detail, but we know much less about who those users are. This report forms part of our work under JISC's Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources programme, but obviously cannot report on the impact of the new facilities being funded under that project, designed to better meet the needs of geographers and social scientists.