NYPL Adds 20,000 High Resolution Maps to the NYPL Warper – free to download

NYPL Warper – New Maps!

This weeks news was about a project I’ve been working on for the last few months with Topomancy – adding a whole load of new maps to one of the largest libraries around the New York Public Library.  These were  added to an award winning crowdsourced geo-rectification, historical map exploration and discovery application. Users can download full resolution TIFF files without the need to login, and if the map has been geo-referenced/rectified/warped, then you can freely download the warped versions too. The images are all in CC-Zero licenses – so, effectively Public Domain in nature. Credit to the library is appreciated though.

From motherboard.vice.com/read/new-york-public-library-releases-20000-beautiful-high-resolution-maps

 

The announcement of the freely available 20,000 maps from the NYPL this week has been covered in a few places including OpenGLAM MotherBoard, OpenCulture and InfoDocket amongst others!

How

Folks may recognise that the Warper has been around for a little while now, and so here’s what we did: We hooked it up with the NYPL Digitial Collections API – this changed the way it requested , instead of internally requesting images from the Image Server, it uses the API properly. A whole suite of import processes were also generated to enable to search of maps from the repository, importing individual maps sheets, the import of individual atlases or layers full of maps, and most usefully the import of newly digitized maps.  A by product of this was to extract some of the library code into the nypl_repo Ruby Gem. There’s even some documentation for the nypl_repo gem for interacting with the NYPL Digital Collections API.

The code for the NYPL Warper can be found on GitHub – although if you are wanting to do this at home – have a look at the code for MapWaprer.net  also available on github.

Little used feature of the warper – finding for maps using a map to search for them!