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ISSN 1039-3498 | no. 42 | December 1999


New digital cartographic acquisitions

Maps undergoing the digital scanning process

Maps undergoing the digital scanning process


Three important digital spatial data sets were recently acquired by the Library’s Map Section and are already making a significant contribution to the reference activity in the reading room.

Of special interest is a set of 19 CD-ROMs from the New South Wales Surveyor General’s Office featuring digital scans of early parish maps and pastoral plans of the Eastern Division and Central Division of New South Wales. The maps are actually annotated ‘working copies’, containing more information than the originals from which they were created. The parish maps reflect the land administration system adapted from the British following European settlement and generally show the actual issue of land grants across the State. The pastoral plans show the extent of each property as one unit, which may comprise a number of separate land grants. These plans, many dating from the 1860s, are still held in the district offices of the Surveyor General’s Office around the State although a number have been sent to the State Records Office.

Cadastral maps or maps showing land ownership and tenure are an important record of land management. One of the principal roles of the State and Territory Land or Surveyor General’s departments is to maintain maps which show this information in a graphical or spatial way.

Since the 1860s when the Robertson Land Acts introduced land administration reforms (still in place today) these maps were regularly published when sufficient changes to land tenure warranted a new edition. District offices maintained working copies of the maps, which show owners names and other information including dates of changes or amendments. This information makes these maps unique but, until the digitisation project, they were not accessible outside the offices where they are held. Filming of the Western Division pastoral plans and most of the parish maps has yet to be done but it is expected the task will be completed in the next 18–36 months.

On completion of the filming, CD-ROM copies of each district’s maps are returned to the respective office and the originals are sent on to the State Records Office. The Mitchell Library and the National Library will also receive a full set of the digital scans for their own collections. The CDs already provided have proved to be a valuable resource for family and local historians.

No less significant is the 30-disk CD-ROM set of every fold-out map issued in the National Geographic magazine since it began in 1888. Update CDs have been issued since 1997.

The National Geographic archive also includes engaging multimedia map tours, interactive time lines that trace the evolution of mapping, key events in National Geographic cartography and enthralling stories about the people and places behind these very special maps. The archive complements the Complete National Geographic for the same period issued on both CD- and DVD-ROM.

The acquisition of a working copy on CD of the Geographic Names Board of South Australia database relating to placenames in that State followed a visit by the map curator to Adelaide in April. The board is currently working on providing Internet access to its placename database sometime in 2000. This database includes information about more than 79 000 current and retrospective placenames across South Australia. Details about each name include grid and geographic coordinate position, historical information, source of information for some of the names, cadastral location and the date the record was created.

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Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au

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