After a great deal of work, and experimenting with different methods of displaying the data, I have completed phase 1 of a new historical map page. It currently has over 100 maps (Scanned PDFs, Geo-Referenced PDFs, some scanned map images, and some photos of maps from the University of Oregon library collection). You can see the page from the link on the maps page, or go directly there:
I would be interested to hear feedback on how well this format works for you. I tried to organize the information so it was easy to find what you were looking for, and also easy to incorporate new maps in the future.
Hey Rob,
Looks good, when I first looked there were broken links but everything seems to be OK now. Nice collection of stuff - thx for taking the time to organize and make available. I'm still digesting...
--Paul
Paul Turner said
Looks good, when I first looked there were broken links but everything seems to be OK now. Nice collection of stuff - thx for taking the time to organize and make available. I'm still digesting...
Yea, I messed up the links at first, but I fixed them. You helped contribute to the collection. I replaced some of your photos with the actual map scans that I found on the USGS site. I just wish I could find some older 24k quads. Most of them are pretty recent.
I will be digesting these for quite some time.
Splendid. A gift.
Don2
I have been experimenting with a new format to utilize the old maps. With feedback from several people here, and quite a few iterations, I have come up with a map of the district that is somewhat interactive (you can't pan and zoom like the trail maps). You click on an area you area interested in researching, and a list of all the historical maps that cover that area will come up. From that results page you can either click on any of the maps listed (which will open in a new window so you don't lose your results), or you can return to the overview map to select a new area. Thanks to Kirk and Brian, we now have almost 2/3rds of Paul's map images classified into one of 9 "zones" (NW, North, NE, West, Center, East, SW, South, SE). I also have the complete 1966 Metsker maps for the district (all that were made), and a few of the 1937 map series. I will continue adding to the Metsker maps and am hopefully going to be getting more scanned historical maps in the next month or so which I will add to the collection. If I can secure a scanned map of an existing map that has images, I will replace the images with the scanned map.
Here is the page if you want to take a look at it:
http://www.trailadvocate.org/maps/testSelector.html
As of today, we have 431 maps or images cataloged on the page. I think this is a much more useful format to display the information. Hopefully a few people will find it useful. It is a great way to waste time!
Once I complete this project, I may offer DVDs of the maps and page so that you can have it locally rather than have to do it all online. The high quality scan images are rather large, and if you are looking at a lot of maps, it is much faster to have the images locally.
Let me know what you think.