United States Digital Map Library

The United States Digital Map Library is a project developed by USGenWeb Archives. It offers researchers and genealogists free access to maps to aid in their work. The site includes State and County Maps, United States Maps, and Indian Land Cessions to the United States Treaty Maps.

Selection Decisions

The maps in the United States Digital Map Library were either published prior to 1923, produced by the United States government, or both. The master files are TIFFs while the online representations are Jpgs--submissions are in digital format, and there is no assistance offered for the scanning process. Therefore it can be assumed that there is variation in the scanning. In general the selection decisions appear to be severely constrained by the limited resources of the project.

Metadata

There is a full page of copyright information, the gist of which is that the goal is to offer an organized, permanent place to make the work available to researchers. The Archives are intended for information that is in the Public Domain, or the copyright has expired. The main page of the each section offers simple metadata (as much as is available): the creation date, file size, author/publisher, location of publisher, and digitization information. Some maps have links to the digitization project information, which contain further technical details on the scanning process

Object Characteristics

There is no search function. Each of the 3 types of maps has a main page. The main page of the State and County Maps contains links to each state, and the state page offers simple metadata (as much as is available): the creation date, file size, author/publisher, location of publisher, and digitization information. The maps themselves have a single zoom function, which seems to be adequate to read the data in most cases. The maps themselves are in fairly good condition, from what I saw.

Audience

The main audience for this digital archives is genealogists. Some good early maps can be valuable to genealogists in finding locations that no longer exist. Visitors are allowed to use all maps from 1923 or earlier for any purposes they see fit. The site runs on contributions and volunteers, so sustainability may be an issue, although the site has been up since 1999. In general the site may be useful to casual visitors but lacks the resources (grants, sustained funding) to be developed on a larger scale, and lacks necessary functionality useful for serious researchers.