British Library Digitizing Huge Royal Atlas, Part of George III Digitization Project

 From Art News:

The British Library in London is a quarter of the way through a major project to re-catalogue, digitise and conserve a 50,000-strong map collection assembled by Britain’s famous collector-king, George III (1738-1820). Among the objects to be digitally photographed is the world’s second largest atlas, which measures a huge 1.8m [5.91 feet] by 2.3m [7.55 feet].
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Tom Harper, the British Library’s curator of antiquarian mapping, calls the atlas “the single most important item in George III’s maps collection”—an assemblage that forms the centrepiece of the library’s 4.5 million-strong collection of maps. “It is completely impractical, completely overblown and totally over the top,” Harper says, adding that Charles II must have liked it, because Klencke was knighted and received several important trade concessions fr om Britain in regards to his sugar plantations in Dutch Brazil.

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Filed under: Digital Preservation, Libraries, Maps, News