Historic Cities Maps

http://historic-cities.huji.ac.il/historic_cities.html

This is a site hosted by the Historic Cities Center of the Department of Geography, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Jewish National and University Library. They write, "The site is intended to contain maps, literature, documents, books and other relevant material concerning the past, present and future of historic cities and to facilitate the location of similar content on the web."




Selection Criteria

Selection Criteria is not explicitly stated, but it seems they want the site to be as thorough as possible, with digital images of objects from their own collections as well as from collections around the world. On the "about us" page they have a plea for collaboration, asking people, whether scholars, collectors, or anyone interested, to submit more digitized historic maps and materials to be included in the site. They want their database to be rich, not curated or limited. They say they have document and other materials on the site too, but I did not find any other digitized information besides the maps.

Metadata

The information about each map varies a little bit. But generally for each map they give the place that the map depicts, the date it was created/published and the original source, whether a book or the name of a mapmaker. A link about the original source takes you to another page with more background information. Sometimes there is not much metadata because, it appears, they simply do not know any longer the details of the maps' production. The maps of Jerusalem seem to have the most metadata--including things like physical size, how it was made and additional notes. I imagine this is because these are from the University's own collection and are of most interest to the people who run the site.




Object Characteristics

Each map is viewable in thumbnail, low resolution and high resolution jpg files. Some maps have another view option--such as a detail of the text in the map. After reading that this was somewhat of a collaborative effort, I didn't expect the images to be very good. But even the low-res images are very good. One, for example, was 386 dpi, 800x652 while the large version was same dpi, 1842x1494. There was no information given on the scanning process. As it is a collaborative effort, I really wonder if they themselves do all the scanning or how they regulate quality if other people are submitting things to them. One annoying thing about their images is a copyright line they have put on all images.

Audience

The audience is the general public, including scholars. The images and metadata are good enough for study and the site is easy enough to browse for anyone with a little curiosity to learn about historic places. They say, "We would like the site to be a meeting place for the lovers of historic cities." They facilitate research by linking to other sites.