Thread: Online Map Libraries (Real World Cartography)

Thanks for sharing!

-Rob A>

Last April I started a site called the BIG Map Blog.

While working on another project I had occasion to spend long hours doing archival research. During this research I found literally thousands of awesome maps that I saved for personal interest/use (I am a lover of maps and a cartographer by academic training). At some point I got real jazzed on the idea of releasing them to the public.

Most map blogs (and there are several amazing ones) will display somewhat large maps, but they're never as large as I'd like; and it's very rare that they'll provide the full-res file. The Big Map Blog – being designed as a tool for the dissemination and use of these old public-domain maps – is proudly transparent in providing files at their highest resolution.

New maps are posted every weekday. You can get updates via twitter or you can just subscribe to the RSS feed if you'd like.

How long am I planning on updating? Well, I have around a thousand optimized maps ready to go, so, possibly "for forever". The queue is stacked with new content until April of 2016 at the moment.

I've been real excited to see all of the maps that the Cartographers' Guild's members have been making; while I'm not personally all that familiar with the fantasy mapping idiom, I am nonetheless a huge fan of well-made maps; and this site has introduced me to a huge number of them. Keep up the good work.

Nice site BigMap, lot of inspiration to get from all the sources mentioned in the thread. Thank you all

Historical maps of Reykjavik (Iceland) 1834 - 1990. Sorry that the text is all in Icelandic, but the jpgs are clear to see on the page and the metadata is understandable.