Workshop in Scotland (BCS Map Curators' Group)

OldMapsOnline.org workflow was presented during a Workshop organized by The Map Curators' Group of the British Cartographic Society.
The title of the workshop was "From paper to screen: Putting maps on the web".

Details about this workshop are available online at the BCS website, including a programme with several interesting presentations related to the subject.

The morning session of the second day of the workshop was devoted to a practical demonstration where Christopher Fleet (National Library of Scotland) and Klokan Petr Pridal (Moravian Library Brno, OldMapsOnline.org) used Bartholomew 1912 map of Edinburgh to present a complete old map processing workflow starting from scanning, over online publishing and georeferencing, to the visualization on the web by overlaying of Google Maps and Google Earth.

Here are the slides from the workshop:

From paper to screen: Putting maps on the web

The online map presentations created during the workshop:

1. Zoomify presentation of the scan of the paper map.
   
2. Google Maps overlay generated by MapTiler from the georeferenced image.
   
3. OpenLayers viewer generated by MapTiler from the georeferenced image.
   

You can also download the original files for this map and try the suggested workflow yourself:

• The file as it was produced by the scanner: 74400474.tif (!!! big: 200+ MBytes - use right click and "Save as")
  
• The georeferenced image: 74400474-geo.tif (!!! big: 200+ MBytes - use right click and "Save as")
  

A step by step tutorial for publishing with Zoomify and MapTiler is available on on our website:
http://help.oldmapsonline.org/publish/

Poster at ICHC 2009

ICHC 2009 - International Conference on the History of Cartography was this year in Copenhagen, Denmark - July 12th - 17th.

Historians and librarians, map curators and people from all around the world who knows each other from discussions at the maphist@, who works at the The History of Cartography Project and who are behind the collections and activities linked from the website http://www.maphistory.info/ had a chance to meet there face to face.

I presented at this conference a poster (PDF) describing our software tools and workflow we are working on, with screenshots of the latest prototypes.
I also made a short demo at the ISCEM meeting (International Society of the Curators of the Early Maps).

This was the first public presentation of the online tools, which are under heavy development now. I also made a report about the development of the open-source image server for JPEG2000 files based on IIPImage, which we are going to publish soon.

ELAG: Workflow for old maps in libraries

At the European Library Automation Group (ELAG) conference we discussed the comprehensive workflow which we recommend for rare maps publishing in libraries.
The final summarizing presentation is attached to this blog post.

OldMapsOnline.org: ELAG 2009 Workshop Report

Detailed notes and links to software tools and online prototypes are available at our support website: http://help.oldmapsonline.org/.

MapTiler: Desktop application for map online publishing from GIS tools

We actively contributed to the development of the MapTiler application, which is an excellent tool for fast and easy to use publishing of any existing raster maps, which are already georeferenced with GIS tools.
MapTiler runs under Windows, MacOSX and Linux. It is a desktop application which loads your existing geodata in formats such as GeoTIFF, JPEG2000 (GeoJP2), ECW, MrSID, HFA, BSB etc. It then generates tiles which are compatible with Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, Yahoo Maps, Microsoft Live (Bing) etc. Resulting maps based on your geodata can overlay these base maps and online visitors can compare them by changing the transparency in the webviewer supplied as part of the output.

To publish your maps you don't need to setup anything special on your webserver, just copy the automatically generated files (JPEG tiles and HTML based webviewers). The form of the publishing is similar to Zoomify tiles, but your georeferenced maps are correctly transformed from the original coordinate system into a Mercator projection used in popular web applications.

We presented the MapTiler application at the ICA Fourth International Workshop: Digital Approaches to Cartographic Heritage in Venice, Italy 6 – 7 April 2009

More info at http://www.maptiler.org/.



In case you are not using any GIS tools in your library yet you probably should not process the maps with MapTiler. We are working on online tools which would allow you to georeference your maps and generate map overlays a la MapTiler from your scans using only a web browser.



On the other hand, if you already use GIS application for georeferencing, then MapTiler is very practical tool for quick and easy publishing your old map on the Internet. Some old maps were published with MapTiler in the National Library of Scotland or in Spain in Malgrat de Mar city council as well as in Czech Republic in Olomouc (Olomouc Bastion 1842, Bohemia and Moravia from 1910).