Open Access: New York Public Library Makes 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Available Online, Free to Download and Use

It’s a big day for map geeks! Here’s news about a new and large treasure chest of map content that is also free to download (hi-res) and use. Enjoy!
From the NYPL:

The Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division is very proud to announce the release of more than 20,000 cartographic works as high resolution downloads. We believe these maps have no known US copyright restrictions.* To the extent that some jurisdictions grant NYPL an additional copyright in the digital reproductions of these maps, NYPL is distributing these images under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
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Though not required, if you’d like to credit the New York Public Library, please use the following text “From The Lionel Pincus & Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library.” Doing so helps us track what happens when we release collections like this to the public for free under really relaxed and open terms. We believe our collections inspire all kinds of creativity, innovation and discovery, things the NYPL holds very dear.

Some of What You’ll Find

1,100 maps of the Mid-Atlantic United States and cities from the 16th to 19th centuries, mostly drawn from the Lawrence H. Slaughter Collection; a detailed collection of more than 700 topographic maps of the Austro-Hungarian empire created between 1877 and 1914; a collection of 2,800 maps from state, county and city atlases (mostly New York and New Jersey); a huge collection of more than10,300 maps from property, zoning, topographic, but mostly fire insurance atlases of New York City dating from 1852 to 1922; and an incredibly diverse collection of more than 1,000 maps of New York City, its boroughs and neighborhoods, dating from 1660 to 1922, which detail transportation, vice, real estate development, urban renewal, industrial development and pollution, political geography among many, many other things.

 How to Access the Maps

• Via NYPL’s Digital Collections Page
• Download via NYPL’s Map Warper, You’ll Need to Create a Free Account

Learn More About Map Warper Here and Here
The full blog post has more about some of the projects that digitized these as well as this disclaimer about there use:

 The maps may be subject to rights of privacy, rights of publicity and other restrictions. It is your responsibility to make sure that you respect these rights.

Kudos to Matt  Knutzen for his intro blog post as well as the two other informative posts (linked above) about Map Warper.

Filed under: Digital Collections, Funding, Interactive Tools, Libraries, Maps, News, Open Access, Public Libraries