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Milestones in Cadastral Cataloguing

New South Wales Department of Lands
Parish of East Goodradigbee, County of Cowley, Land District of Yass 1885
map mounted on linen; 52.5 x 39.3 cm
Maps Collection; nla.map-rm1909

Map cataloguer Andrew Gloe
Photo: Greg Power

Ian Goldsmith, Map Acquisitions and Cataloguing
Photo: Greg Power

In the National Library of Australia’s Maps Reading Room every second or third enquiry seems to require a cadastral map to provide at least part of the answer.

Australians have a great thirst for knowledge of their local communities, family properties, cemeteries, public buildings and landmarks. Cadastral maps provide a great deal of useful information, usually including lot and section numbers, and names of original owners, which form the basis of many family history enquiries. In response to the enquiries the Maps Collection, which now exceeds 600 000 items, has had particular priority given to making its parish and county maps of Australia readily accessible.

Since the early 1990s National Library map cataloguers have been systematically working through the cadastral maps of each state and territory to provide simple, straightforward access to all the parish and county maps. At the end of May 2008 the staff completed cataloguing the more than 7000 parish maps and over 100 county maps held of New South Wales, the last of the states and territories in this retrospective conversion project.

With the completion of the New South Wales cadastral maps, the National Library’s catalogue now provides catalogue access to hard-copy maps of most of the parishes and counties in every Australian state and mainland territory.

It also means that the National Library’s catalogue and the Libraries Australia public database provide quick and easy access to the names of most parishes and counties now or previously in use throughout Australia, bypassing, in many cases, the need to consult obscure, hard-to-get reference tools.

Issues in cataloguing maps for access

Australian cadastral maps lack a clear series statement, so ordinarily it would not be possible to retrieve a full set of a state’s cadastral maps for browsing purposes. Therefore, in order to retrieve all New South Wales cadastral maps produced by the New South Wales Department of Lands, a decision was made to provide an artificial series heading such as:

  • Parish maps of New South Wales
  • County maps of New South Wales

Similar headings have been used for other states and territories. The eastern states using the English-based cadastral system (i.e. counties and parishes) follow the same pattern as New South Wales:

  • Parish maps of Victoria
  • County maps of Victoria
  • Parish maps of Queensland, etc.

Where the jurisdiction uses a Welsh-based cadastre, characterised by land divisions known as ‘Hundreds’ in place of ‘Parishes’, as applies in South Australia and the Northern Territory, the user can substitute the word ‘Hundred’ for ‘Parish’ in the generic series heading for that state.

One further variation occurs where cadastral maps have been issued in series at a particular scale (such as Queensland 1:250,000 series cadastral maps). It is a complication which confounds many researchers, however the user can quickly access all relevant series simply by using the generic series heading for that state.

Adding to the problems in providing subject and keyword access to particular parishes is the fact that parish names are not unique. In other words, other counties may have a parish with the same name. A sequential search on titles such as Parish of Wentworth will reveal parishes of this name in the counties of Brisbane, Narromine, Sandon, and Wentworth.

It follows, therefore, that geographical subject headings for parishes also need to be differentiated in their qualifiers to allow precision of retrieval such as:

  • Wentworth ( Brisbane County, N.S.W.: Parish)
  • Wentworth ( Narromine County, N.S.W.: Parish), etc.

The topical subject heading ‘Real property’ is also used, in combination with selecting the format ‘Maps’, to allow retrieval of all cadastral mapping held in our map collection, regardless of jurisdiction. This can be narrowed down by county or state if preferred.

Establishing placenames, which include parish and county names, requires that cataloguers verify each placename—both in spelling and the geospatial coordinates—in Australia’s official gazetteer, ‘Geoscience Australia’s Place Names’ (www.ga.gov.au/map/names).

Cataloguers also ensure that the geographical coordinates of any parishes or counties are encoded in the map catalogue record to enable access by geospatial searching, a relatively new method of retrieval gaining popularity among map users as new innovative map retrieval systems become available.

In addition to providing thousands of parish and county names to the Library’s catalogue and National Bibliographic Database, by working closely with our Map Reading Room staff, the map cataloguers have addressed the major barriers to easy access of this set of heavily-used maps.

Selected parish maps of the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales and other states and territories will be digitised over the next few years to make them even more widely accessible to offsite users.

Ian Goldsmith and Andrew Gloe
Acquisitions and Cataloguing, Maps Collection