This week's Featured Web Site is Historic Map Works, a site which could be very useful to researchers. The company has online versions of a large number of old maps keyed to modern-day coordinates. Researchers can trace the development of a location over time as shown in successive maps. As towns grow and streets get lost or renamed, these features can be a great aid in pinpointing where Mints, businesses or homes once stood.
Based in Westbrook Maine, Historic Map Works, LLC is an Internet company formed to create a historic digital map database of North America and the world. Drawing on the largest physical collection of American property atlases of its type, it is our aim to be the single best online destination for map enthusiasts and researchers alike.
In addition to our own atlas collection, we incorporated our scans of the antiquarian world map collection from the Osher Map Library and Smith Center for Cartographic Education located at the University of Southern Maine. Combining these collections allows site visitors a vast amount of information spanning several centuries of cartographic information.
The vast majority of our database was created by scanning an original map at a high resolution by our team of highly skilled image technicians. After scanning, this team processes out the major imperfections while maintaining the look of an antiquarian map.
Maps are then uploaded and cataloged for viewing on our website. Our technicians geocode each map to a modern map to enable the search by address function. Linking the historic images in our database with geocode data allows visitors to search by modern day address or latitude and longitude coordinates. Other methods to view our maps include browsing by geographic location as well as searching our maps via keywords, town names, makers names, or simply by year.
Historic Map Works has two websites which host our maps. The first is www.historicmapworks.com which is aimed at individual subscribers and the second is Historic Map Works Library Edition which is distributed by ProQuest to public libraries and universities.