"AFRITERRA is a not-for-profit archive of mostly antique maps and books, providing a definitive place for students and the general public to study and preserve the original rare maps of Africa as a medium linking art and science and history." Elsewhere, its goal has been described as "cataloging and digitizing over 10,000 rare early maps of Africa...Opening in 2002, the library will provide a focused visual record on Africa...through slides, lectures, exhibits, prints, and the sharing of files." The mounting of its images of maps of Africa is also noted on the Web Images page. See the Holdings page for lists of maps and books, and links to sample map images.

A project from the Swedish national archives to digitize the oldest Swedish cadastral maps (1633-55), 'Geometriska jordeböckerna', including their accompanying text. Ten plans from the 1637 MS cadastral atlas by Karl Karlsson Gyllenhielm of an area in Småland have been put on the web. See also 'Månadens karta', explanatory pages with sample illustrations.

The Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress is contributing to the American Memory Project with a wide range of map images. For details, see Images of early maps on the web: Large general sites.

'The Ancient World Mapping Center exists to promote cartography and geographic information science as essential disciplines within the field of ancient studies. The staff and affiliates of the Center work to advance the study of the ancient world through innovative and collaborative research, teaching, and community outreach activities using cartography, geographic information science, and historical geography.' Includes sample maps from the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World.

Links to 26 Italian archives engaged in mounting material on the web, run by the Archivio di Stato di Cagliari

A reference work designed to provide information about the creation and boundary changes of every county in the United States, from the earliest county creation in the 1600s to 1990.

See ‘Building a Globally Distributed Historical Sheet Map Set of Austro-Hungarian Topographic Maps, 1877-1914’ (by Patrick McGlamery in RLG DigiNews 9, 1 (February 2005), describing a project to scan and geo-reference images from the 776 sheets in the series) .

The aim of this project is to create an international, metadata-driven, dynamic access tool that will enable users to find and view scanned and geo-referenced images from 1877-1914 Austro-Hungarian topographic maps (AuHu75) by querying an easy-to-use digital gazetteer. The 776 sheets are known in a total of about 3,665 editions. A prototype of the AuHu75 can be found on the MAGIC website of the University of Connecticut’s Homer Babbidge Library.

Related cataloguing and image capture projects involving the Coronelli corpus, the Fra Mauro map and thousands of other maps. See also GeoWeb and 'Hic Sunt Leones' - both below.

[From an earlier English text version, headed: 'Retrospective digitisation of historical geographical maps at the State and University Library Bremen']. "The State and University Library Bremen plans to digitize its collection of historical maps and present the digitized maps via its website. In the first phase, which is now completed, 100 historical maps have been digitized. This phase has been financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the German Research Council...It is planned to digitize the whole collection and present it via the Internet in a second phase". Project duration: October 2000 to September 2002.

A twice-yearly update (started November 2002) with brief details of new and developing digital cartographic projects, gathered by Anne Taylor, University of Cambridge, on behalf of BRICMICS (British and Irish Committee on Map Information and Cataloguing Systems)

"A site exploring the papers of Charles Booth, his family, and his survey into life and labour in London. This web site accompanies a new project to put digitised versions of the material described here online. The full Online Guide to the Papers of Charles Booth will be launching in January 2001".

'Charting the Nation is a collaborative digital imaging and cataloguing project with the aim of preserving and widening access to maps of Scotland and their associated archives dating from 1590 to 1740.' The intention is to mount about 3,600 images, of maps and related texts.

'The CHGIS will establish a standardized coding system to identify historical administrative units for different periods in Chinese History, and will also provide a base GIS platform for researchers to use for spatial analysis, temporal statistical modeling, and representation of selected historical units as digital maps. The project will begin with several temporal slices from the Qing Dynasty and work backwards in time, allowing for additional information about intervening points in time to be added at any stage in the process'. For results to date see From Tibet to Altai - Russian Historical Maps of China.

"Journey with us through time and place. Our rich hidden resources are now open to all. Collect Britain will grow over time. This is just a first selection from the British Library's vast collections". Funded by the New Opportunities Fund. The Collections page features the following map series, which will feature in the final online collection: The Crace Collection of Maps of London; The Ordnance Surveyors' Drawings; The Unveiling of Britain [maps and views 800-1600]; King George III's Topographical Collection; Deptford Plans and Drawings Collection. For fuller details of these series, as they are mounted on the web, see the appropriate pages in the Web Images section.

For descriptive notes, see Images of early maps on the web: large general sites

[The project closed in 2001]. A consortium of archives in Denmark, Germany and Sweden. 'In this project we show more than 10 000 maps and text documents, free of charge. The selection is made to make it possible to get an overview of what type of information you can gain from different times from the archives'. It is supported by the European Commission's INFO2000 programme. The site includes high quality images, and commentary on the materials used for the maps and on the digitisation process. See also entries for the separate countries under Web Images

Georg Wenker's "Linguistic Atlas of the German Empire" (Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs; data collected between 1876 and 1887) is the first and to date most extensive linguistic atlas in existence. Featuring data from approximately 50,000 locations, it represents the only total survey and cartographic depiction of the dialects of a language. With their as yet unmatched clarity, the 1,668 hand-drawn maps are a cultural historical asset of the first order. This is why the endangered atlas (the 22 colors are beginning to fade), which for technical and financial reasons has never been published, is to be conserved and made publicly accessible. To this end, the Wenker Atlas maps are being photographed, digitized, incorporated into various databases, and made freely available via the Internet...

To date (19 December 2002), all component maps have been digitalized, 276 maps are available online. [Extracted from the English version of the 'Projektbeschreibung']

"The Research Libraries of The New York Public Library will digitize and make broadly available on its website, a collection of antiquarian maps and atlases, 1660-1850 of the United States Middle-Atlantic region. With support from the National Endowment of the Humanities, this two year grant 2000-2002 will catalog, perform conservation work on some of the maps, and digitize approximately 1,190 sheet maps and 150 maps contained in atlases."

Currently comprising 75 separate historical GIS projects. On this see: Michael Buckland and Lewis Lancaster, 'Combining Place, Time, and Topic: The Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative', D-Lib Magazine, May 2004, Vol. 10, No.5.

A series of ongoing projects, each with their own web page, as follows: Tithe maps; Enclosure and rating, parochial asessment, sanitary and drainage maps; Boundaries of historic (pre-1850) parishes and townships of England and Wales; Ordnance Survey; British Town Maps, 1470-1895: A Catalogue and Cartographical Analysis; Maps and History in South-West England; Cadastral maps in the service of the state: a history of property mapping; Historical Atlas of South-West England; English maps: a history.

Two projects, both covering the separate US states and Canadian provinces: 'Official [Highways] Maps Master List' (OMML) and the projected 'Petro Maps Master List'.

Experiments are underway to see if 3D scanning techniques could be used to piece together the more than 1,163 marble fragments that make up the giant map of ancient Rome (c.200 A.D.). This would form part of the Michelangelo Project. On this, see a BBC News piece of 28 April 2004 by David Whitehouse.

'Une bibliothèque patrimoniale et encyclopédique', to comprise 70,000 'noteworthy' digitised texts [click on 'Recherche' and restrict to 'Ouvrages en mode texte' and 'Monographies en mode image'] and over 80,000 images. The works involved include Ptolemy, Ortelius, Sanson and various venerable commentaries on early maps and charts, e.g. by Hamy. Making a browsing selection, via 'Recherche', and entering 'cart*' in 'Mots du Titre' produced 1025 entries (not all relevant), whereas entering 'cartes' in 'Sujet' produced 199, 'atlas' 28 and 'cartes nautiques' 116. The black and white images are taken from microfilm of variable quality but it can be considerably enlarged; choose TIFF or PDF format via 'Téléchargement de l'ouvrage' [examined December 2003]

'The cartographical and graphical website of the national Library Marciana of Venice'. The online catalogue links to over 20,000 low resolution map images. Searching can also be done via an interactive map. There is an alphabetical listing of the works involved. See also under Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia, above.

A computerised record of the changing administrative boundaries of Britain, currently working backwards from the early 19th century to the 17th. See also 'A Vision of Britain Through Time'.

Involving many members of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL). The GeoHistory Network will serve as a flexible and inclusive repository for information about the southeastern Pennsylvania region. The historical base map of land records has been scanned by the City of Philadelphia, Department of Records and three Philadelphia atlases (1860, 1895 and 1910) will be included in the GIS for exploring the history, culture, and architecture of the region.

'Texts and resources for the historical and cartographical research and the carto-bibliography', edited by Piero Falchetta of the Biblioteca Marciana. These include a listing of the early maps of America in the Marciana, studies on de'Barbari, Cabot, and Fra Mauro, the contents pages of Imago Mundi, and the entire sequence of place-names from a 14th century portolan chart. See also under Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venezia, above.

"A joint project of the Historic Cities Center of the Department of Geography, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish National and University Library. It is intended to contain maps, literature, documents, books and other relevant material concerning the past, present and future of historic cities and to facilitate the location of similar content on the web. We would like the site to be a meeting place for the lovers of historic cities and to function as a virtual archive, which will constantly develop and grow. The content will be loaded gradually: first we will load several hundreds of high quality city maps which we scanned, and brief documented histories of some of the most important cities." See also under Web Images (Continental Europe: 'Town plans'; Russia (St Petersburg))

Scans of maps and related texts on the website of the University Library, Freiburg im Breisgau. A joint project of the libraries of the EUCOR Confederation and the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe.

The National and University Library of Iceland and the National Library of Norway are co-operating to produce electronic images of pre-1900 maps of Iceland.

Images from early books relating to economic history, from the collections of the Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica "F. Datini" - Prato, the Biblioteca Comunale "A. Lazzerini" - Prato and the Biblioteca Riccardiana - Firenze. See various individual entries in the appropriate parts of the Web Images section, or go to the Homepage and use the Sitesearch for 'immagini'.

"The Imago II Project, achieved in 1997-2000, had the goal of turning from traditional techniques of reproduction to the new digital ones, to preserve original documents. Many of the most consulted series are now available for a virtual access, in the State Archive or on Internet since june 2002. Today are in the Imago information system: Alessandrino Cadastre, Urban Roman Cadastre, a selection of the Gregoriano Cadastre including the 600 most important towns of Papal State, the carthography of the old rural Cadastre. Also the roman parchments were digitized, and are now included in a common database with the others, were often abstracts ("regesti") are included. Some of the more useful registers are digitized too: alphabetic registers of roman notaries; some ancient registers of the Tesorerie provinciali. Finally, some precious items as the illuminated manuscript of Liber Regulae. Within the project about 5.000 digital color photos have been done of maps and manuscripts, 25.000 colour scanning of ancient maps and parchments, 100.000 greyscale scanning of cadastre and notarial registers. Images in jpeg format have been masterized in about 500 CD-R while copies of this images, in a MrSID format, are now available in high resolution on this website." [Text also in Italian - note that it is necessary to register before consulting the images]

A joint project between the Biblioteca Nacional José Martì, Havana (Cuba) and the Biblioteca Angelica, Rome, to create a web-based databank containing descriptions and images of maps and travel accounts relating to Latin America. The results can be seen at the search page (also in Italian). Access to the much enlarged, but only medium resolution, images is via a 'subject' [i.e. geographical area] option, spread over many screens; or enter 'cartografia' into 'Word search' (which produced descriptions of 228 items - those with a globe symbol having an image).

"This website serves geographical information and maps that are products of the LEWIS AND CLARK HISTORIC LANDSCAPE PROJECT that has been conducted at the Geographic Resources Center (GRC), Department of Geography, University of Missouri in partnership with the Missouri State Archives, Office of the Missouri Secretary of State. With the primary goals to geo-reference, digitize, and map all of the retrievable information from the Lewis and Clark journals and the 18th and 19th-century land survey notes along the Big River Corridors of the state of Missouri, this effort should serve as a significant educational contribution to the national commemoration of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial (2003-2006)." 18th and 19th century maps are expected. The site includes a page of links to other Lewis & Clark sites.

Concerned with mapping the changing boundaries of administrative units, from parishes and communes up to nations and empires, as a framework for studying the European past.

"The Digital Library for International Research, under the aegis of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers aims to identify, catalogue, conserve, and make electronically accessible important early maps and related information as well as unique maps from archaeological excavation and exploration by American overseas research centers around the Mediterranean as well as those in other areas with related materials. The multi-phase project will result in a fully searchable web-based catalog of these materials enriched with selected digitized images and texts".

"Ultimately the International Research Maps Database will contain bibliographic records and graphical images for the most important maps from the various collections of the American Overseas Research Centers, representing approximately 5,000 unique maps. To date, we have surveyed over 3,000 maps from centers in the Mediterranean area. Brief inventories and selected digital maps are currently available through the Mapping Mediterranean Lands project" (March 2005). For a selection of images see Digital Maps from the Mapping Mediterranean Lands Project; and also Brief Inventories from the participating libraries.

"'Mapping the realm’ is a project funded by the British Academy to create an interactive online version of the celebrated medieval ‘Gough Map’ of Great Britain. The original map is held in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It probably dates from the fourteenth century but neither the identity of its author or its exact origins are known...The project seeks to find out more about this enigmatic map. Using a scan of the original, undertaken by DigiData Technologies...GIS makes it possible to study the map’s content and assess how it was made, who made it, and what it was made for - all questions yet to be resolved." Queen’s University, Belfast in collaboration with the Bodleian Library. See 'Britain's first road map' (Nick Millea on this project, in the Hilary 2006 issue of the Oxford University Alumni magazine, Oxford Today).

Seven UK libraries, led by the Bodleian (Oxford), will convert their catalogue cards for post-1850 overseas mapping into a common database. Series mapping will be treated at series level. The resulting records will be mounted on COPAC, the online catalogue of CURL, the Consortium of University Research Libraries.

"The Memory contains images and texts from the often hidden collections of Dutch cultural institutions." Use the Advanced Search to identify and select the various cartographic elements [as at December 2004]: ‘Atlassen uit het Scheepvaartmuseum’ (the Atlas Van Loon and the expanded version of van Keulen’s Nieuwe Lichtende Zee-Fakkel), 'Atlassen’ (the Atlas Van der Hagen and the Atlas Beudeker), and ‘Suriname in kaart gebracht’.

A Flash-based, high resolution, interactive version of the 1748 Nolli map of Rome (176 x 208 cm when joined), supported by research papers. "Using the Map Engine, the user can pan in any direction and zoom in or out from the macro-scale of the city to the micro-scale of the building. Layers have been created to focus on particular topics, for example gardens". 1,320 sites are indexed both by position and by feature type. "In addition the search mechanism provides annotations for all sites including modern name and location, type, architect, time period, and references. A simple search will provide results that match in any of these categories, as well as retrieve entries in the glossary, bibliography, and any articles that appear on the site". See < http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1019/p25s01-stct.html > 'An ancient map of Rome that's surprisingly up to date' (by Jim Regan in the Christian Science Monitor, 19 October 2005).

"The State's historical, and eventually current Parish, Town, County and Municipal maps are being collected and digitally photographed in District Office sets" by the Department of Lands, New South Wales. All the 35,000 currently available Historical editions of the parish maps can be found as MrSID images. See also the entry under Web Images

Measuring 22 x 1 foot in size, it is "seemingly a mediaeval copy of a Roman original". "Scanned images and digitization [will] enable me to offer a detailed entry for every physical feature, route stretch, and name marked (several thousand in all), as well as to deconstruct the cartographic production process and successive copyists’ changes" (Richard Talbert, Ancient World Mapping Center, July 2004).

A scientific evaluation by Jana Niederöst, of the Institute of Geodesy and Photogrammetry of the ETH in Zurich, of Franz Ludwig Pfyffer's relief model of Central Switzerland. Covering about one tenth of the country, this is the oldest preserved, large relief model of Switzerland

"A collaborative project sponsored by the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme to create a union catalogue, with viewable images, of printed maps and topographical prints of County Durham created before 1860 held by Durham University Library, Durham County Library, Durham Cathedral Library and the Bowes Museum."

Maps of Scotland produced by Timothy Pont (c.1583-96) in the National Library of Scotland - their digitisation and study. The project is now finished but the results of the work remain available. See also the comments (under 'Functionality') on About the listing of early map image sites on the web.

A project, by the Institute of Classical Philology in Bern, to produce a new critical edition of the Greek text of the Geographia and its maps. Its duration is April 2001-December 2006. "Die Ptolemaios-Forschungsstelle in Bern, die dem Institut für Klassische Philologie der Universität Bern angegliedert ist, hat sich zum Ziel gesetzt, eine zweisprachige Neuausgabe der Geographie des Klaudios Ptolemaios in die Wege zu leiten. Vorgesehen ist eine Neubearbeitung des seit 1843/45 nie mehr vollständig redigierten griechischen Textes unter Berücksichtigung der 1930 wiederentdeckten Ptolemaioshandschrift in Istanbul, eine deutsche Übersetzung sowie eine Umzeichnung der Karten. In einem Ergänzungsband sollen wesentliche Aspekte wie handschriftliche Überlieferung, Messmethoden, Gestaltung des Ortskataloges, Wirkungsgeschichte u.a.m. in einzelnen Kapiteln behandelt werden. Das Projekt wird vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds und von der Bernischen Hochschulstiftung unterstützt. Die Forschungsstelle bemüht sich um internationale und interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit." See report in Cartographica Helvetica 31 (2005) and a note by Oswald Dreyer-Eimbcke in the IMCOS Journal 104 (Spring 2006) pp.51, 54.

"A consortium headed by the National Library of Scotland and including the National Archives of Scotland, the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN), and over 100 Scottish archives and libraries, to create digital content for the study and celebration of social, cultural and industrial heritage in Scotland, complementary to and integrated with the SCRAN resource base." The National Library alone plans to scan over 1000 maps. Maps can be searched for, but only small, low resolution images are available to non-subscribers.

Notice included in the September 2001 issue of the WAML News & Notes: Branner Earth Sciences Library & Map Collections, of the Stanford University Libraries, is pleased to announce the receipt of a grant through the California State Library to scan and catalog the maps and field notebooks of the Stanford Geological Survey from 1897 to the present. This two year project will be funded jointly by funds from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford, and the Stanford University Libraries.

The collection includes approximately 5,000 manuscript items that primarily cover portions of the state of California. As the maps and field notebooks are held exclusively at Branner Library, they are a unique resource for the people of the state of California and across the county. The scanned maps and field notebooks, as well as the accompanying metadata, will ultimately be available to all for free over the Web. Although it is expected that the project will take two years to complete, the Web site will be fully functional after the first year with a goal of 500 images and records available to view.

For more information contact: Julie Sweetkind-Singer, GIS & Map Librarian < sweetkind(at)stanford.edu > [NB. You need to replace (at) with the @ symbol].

"TimeMap TMJava is a novel mapping applet which generates complete interactive maps with a few simple lines of html. It provides a way of easily enriching web pages with historical or contemporary information that goes far beyond static jpg map images". The University of Sydney.

'United Kingdom Boundary Outline and Reference Database for Education and Research Study'. This a web-based Interface that provides digitised boundary datasets of the UK, available in many GIS formats (MapInfo MIF/MID, ArcView Shape, Arc/Info Export and several others), for users to download.

"The University of Maryland and LexisNexis U.S., a leading provider of news, business and legal information services, announced an alliance today aimed at preserving images of the U.S. Serial Set Maps while making the maps easily accessible and searchable online.

The U.S. Serial Set is a vast historical resource that contains an ongoing collection of U.S. Government publications compiled under a directive of Congress, and consequently traces virtually all aspects of American history, including trade and commerce, military history, geography, scientific exploration, and anthropology.

Already, LexisNexis® has digitized nearly the entire U.S. Serial Set collection spanning 1789-1969, including 325,000 documents drawn from nearly 13,000 volumes, 52,000 maps, and the American State Papers.

This new project will enhance the quality of the maps section. The University of Maryland is providing the original maps so LexisNexis can rescan the collection into high-resolution digital images in color and black and white. Current scans taken from microfiche cannot provide the color or the same clarity as a scan from the original maps". [Press release June 27, 2005]. See also the Library of Congress note on the U.S. Serial Set.

The Center was established at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, in October 2005. "The facility, the only one of its kind in the world, will use the latest technology to preserve and create enhanced digital versions of maps and aerial photography... In many cases, the original paper and photographic versions of these documents are deteriorating and might be lost if not preserved in electronic form... unlimited access via the Web... At the same time that maps and aerial photographs are being preserved in digital form, they will be electronically catalogued and cross-referenced, making it possible for the first time to easily search for desired materials...With digitization of flat topographical maps we will be able to create three-dimensional computer representations down to a single part of one county in any state in any year in which a map was made. We will begin with our own country, but the ultimate scope of this project is global, and maps never stop changing." [Extracts from the Press Release, 17 October 2005 ' Unique research center established with $4 million gift'.]