What's new
News from herimap
What has changed, and what we have announced, newest first.
What's on at a historic house
Events at historic houses across Europe now appear on herimap, gathered from each house's own website. They are shown in the language the house wrote them, with an English reading beside it, and every one links back to the house's own page. herimap is the informer, not the organiser — where a house takes bookings, it does so on its own site.
A house with no website can be found by name
If your house has no site of its own, type its name instead. herimap reads the pages it finds, keeps only what a page can quote in its own words, tells you which pages it read, and marks anything it saw just once. Contact details and your address are never taken from someone else's page.
Photographs wait for your word
Photographs found during an import are held out of sight until you say they may be shown. herimap reads each one's licence before anything else touches the file, and you attest to the rights for each photograph on its own, never in a single sweep.
The map is open
herimap has been readable only with a password while its first owners filled their entries in. That is over: anyone can now open the map, plan a route past these houses, and read what their owners have written. Owners can still claim a house, correct it, or ask for it to be taken off — the same three asks, on the same page as before. For the moment search engines are still asked to stay away, so the map is open to anyone with the address but not yet listed in search.
Draft your house page from your own website
Give herimap the address of your house's own website and it will read it and prepare a draft — the description, the details, the photographs — for you to go through field by field. Nothing is written to your house until you accept it, and you may take only the parts that are right.
The page keeps up on its own
Notifications, unread counts and the work waiting on your console now arrive as they happen, without a reload. If you would rather be told while the tab sits behind another window, desktop notifications can be turned on for that browser.
Call off one session without cancelling the event
A single session of a recurring event can now be called off with a reason, and put back on again — everyone expecting it is told either way, and the reservations they hold are waiting. Cancelling a whole event does the same for every session still to come and leaves the ones already held alone. A one-off date can also be added to a series without disturbing the pattern behind it.
See who is coming
An organiser can now open a session and read who will be there: the people holding a seat, and beneath them the people who said they are coming to every session in the series. Both are named, and both count towards what the session should expect.
Event times say whose clock they are on
The times of an event now name the clock they are given in. Where the hour at the venue differs from yours, both are shown — your time first, the venue's beside it — so an afternoon concert in Bohemia is never read as an afternoon where you happen to be.
The corpus can now be cited
The research corpus published in August has been deposited under a permanent identifier — doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22149838 — nine files under the Open Database License, with checksums. A citation to it outlives any address on this site.
A description that reads like one
The description of a house or an association can now carry headings, emphasis, lists, quotations, tables, links and pictures. Write it with the toolbar, or switch to Markdown and type it directly; formatting help sits beside both.
What favouriting a house does
Favouriting a house is both a bookmark and a subscription: when that house announces a public event, it reaches you in your daily digest. Both halves are now stated where you save it, and every digest carries a link to change how often it comes, or to stop it.
Tell us what is broken
A short form now takes a fault or an idea, with up to four screenshots. Every report is given a reference and tied to your account, so there is somewhere to write back to once it is settled. It is linked from the footer and from your account menu.
Associations have a place of their own
The associations that look after these houses now have a page of their own: a crest, a description, the houses that belong to them, a gallery, and what they have coming up — and a directory that lists them all. Behind it, an association can invite its members and keep its own calendar.
Send a photograph with your message
A message can now carry up to four images or PDFs, ten megabytes each. Every file is checked before it appears, and a picture opens at full size in the conversation rather than being downloaded.
Houses near where you are
“Near me” now sits in the search row as well as on the map. It starts at a kilometre and widens the circle only when that one is empty, which is what a city centre and open country each need. Distance, region, events and stay & hire narrow the results together.
Write to the people who keep these houses
Every house page now carries a way to reach whoever looks after it, as do the results on the map and the members of an association. Replies gather in one place, and no address is revealed to anyone by writing or by answering.
83,382 historic sites, published
The catalogue behind herimap is now an open research corpus: 83,382 sites across 45 countries, of which 65,927 carry an estimate of ownership and 23,466 are privately held. It is published in full, with checksums and a citation.
House pages that read without JavaScript
A published house now sends its facts, its description and its photograph in the page itself rather than assembling them in the browser. Search engines and AI assistants can read a house the way a person does.
Six languages, read end to end
Czech, German, Spanish, French and Italian have been read in full against the English original and corrected for terminology, for register, and for the small errors that accumulate in a growing interface.
Invite the people who help you run the house
An owner can invite a partner, a manager or a member of the family by email. The invitation is bounded to the one house it was sent from and grants nothing beyond it.
Sign in with Google or Microsoft
Alongside an email address and a password, a Google or Microsoft account can now be used to sign in. Existing accounts are unaffected.