Tag: library

Open Access Maps

The New York Public Library has scanned and released 20,000 historical maps under a Creative Commons license, including this 1874 map of Tyrone Township showing Lamoka Lake.

you can have the maps, all of them if you want, for free, in high resolution. We’ve scanned them to enable their use in the broadest possible ways by the largest number of people.

That’s a low resolution map below, go to the NYPL Map Warper to see this in high resolution. The library is crowdsourcing the georectification of these maps, which you can also do at the Map Warper.

OpenCulture.com actually explains the georeferencing part better than the NYPL does. Essentially, you can can overlay the historic maps on modern maps, like in Google Earth. Yes, you can download them as .KML files.

Tyrone Township 1874. Low resolution copy. From The Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library