QR codes applied to Welsh historical plaques for updated information

Volunteers in North Wales are using smartphone friendly technology for providing historic tours.

Areas in North Wales are now placing QR codes on various different historic sites across the country in order to help to provide virtual tour guides for visitors to the country as well as locals who would like to learn more about their own history.

This not only helps to provide more information, but it also keeps the data up to date.

The people involved in this project have realized that there is a great deal of history connected to these sites, and a simple plaque may not be enough to provide all of the interesting facts that someone might want to learn. It is the details of history that truly brings it to life, but those facts often go undiscovered as the information is not provided in a location in which an individual is most likely to be interested.

Two volunteers have spearheaded this QR codes project, named Eugene Stevenson and Rhodri Clark.

Two volunteers have spearheaded this project, named Eugene Stevenson and Rhodri Clark. They believe that using these QR codes is an important solution to the struggle that the country has faced in sharing the fascinating stories behind its landscapes, buildings, and other historical locations.

Stevenson is a kitchen designer, while Clark is a freelance journalist. Together, they have identified some of the most historic sites in Wales and have affixed QR codes to their plaques in order to encourage visitors to discover more about their histories and significance. Smartphone and tablet users can simply scan the barcode in order to be automatically redirected to a webpage that provides much more detail about the specific site being visited. This information would likely remain entirely unknown without the use of these little black and white squares.

The history project has taken a broad view of the topic, which means that it provides QR codes that cover everything from recent events to geological features that formed nearly half a million years ago. At the time that this article was written, the two volunteers had already achieved 11,500 different scans that have directed to their HistoryPoints website, which was launched nine months ago.