Online reviews of Old Maps Online

Wednesday, January 23, 2013


After nearly a whole year of Old Maps Online being live we thought we'd do a quick review of blog comments mentioning the site which have been posted since the initial flurry of interest following the launch. Below are a selection of what we found people have said about actually using the site.

1st March 2012, Brownhillsbob's Brownhills Blog
"Here’s a great one... It’s a new site for old maps – it’s got lots of great material, including Ordnance Survey popular and inter-war editions, and the resolution and working area are great too, often a bit of a limitation on such services. Best of all, it’s absolutely free of charge to use."

30th March 2012, Latest Web Crunch
"The 3 Best Places To Find Free Historical Maps Online: [1] Old Maps Online. This website has been recently designed. If you want to search for any information related to maps, check out this website. It combines map data with an excellent technology and offers brilliant results."

9th April 2012, About.com Genealogy
"This mapping site is really neat, serving as an easy-to-use searchable gateway to historical maps hosted online by repositories around the world. Search by place-name or by clicking in the map window to bring up a list of available historical maps for that area, and then narrow further by date if needed. The search results take you directly to the map image on the website of the host institution."

13th August 2012, The Cambridge Room
"For those of you who love historical maps, there is a new database called Old Maps Online, that allows free access to maps in libraries around the world. Described by its creators as like Google for old maps, Old Maps Online is a central repository to a vast collection of maps across the globe."

23rd September 2012, Genealogy's Star
"If you want to see more of what is available, then you should take a look at Old Maps Online. This site allows the user to search for online digital historical maps across numerous different collections via a geographical search."

"The David Rumsey Map Collection has a whole bunch of historical maps. Using the Old Maps Online index, which I searched for maps of SF, 1910-1915, I found this "Chevalier" map from 1911. … The nice thing about the Old Maps Online index is that you can restrict by date as  well as by location. It seems better than the built-in search and browsing feature on the David Rumsey site; when I had searched 
there initially, I didn't see anything immediately promising."


6th December 2012, Andrew Zolnai Blog
"Maps are forever... or they are Man's best friend. I'm a big fan of the British Library ... - bl.uk has an amazing array of old maps, which they just finished georeferencing through a significant effort in crowd-sourcing … These maps are now linked to Old Maps Online of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project at University of Portsmouth UK. And being an amateur medievalist* myself, I set the time slider atop the page to between 1000 and 1725, and presto! up comes a 1610 map of "Cambridgshire..."

7th December 2012, Clark Library Blog
"Because it pools the resources of many of the world’s premiere map collections, a visit to the Old Maps Online portal is like taking a trip to many libraries at once, all with a few clicks of a mouse. It may be the place to turn for that hard-to-find map you’re searching for."
Vienna detail from 'Viennense Territorium
ob Res Bellicas inter Christianos et Turcas
Nuperrime E...' by Nicolaum Visscher,
[1685-1700] from the Moravian Library
 

10th January 2013, Border Telegraph 
(by Peter Munro, one of our speakers in Edinburgh) 
"The website provides an easy to use method of finding places and 
even streets around the world without having to know the name of 
the map, the name of the cartographer and the name of the library 
that holds the map. The maps can also be searched in foreign 
languages and that's useful for us in accessing foreign maps. I've 
managed to find streets and places in Romania and Austria on old 
maps that aren't mentioned on current maps and that living people 
hadn't heard of."



The good news is that people are still discovering us, liking our site and, perhaps most importantly, finding maps they want to see. With the impending addition of a number of new map collections which will increase the choice of maps we link to we can reasonably hope this trend will continue.
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