Developing a Digital Map Collection for Research and Teaching: The “Planning Atlanta: A New City in the Making, 1930s–1990s” Collection

Abstract

The Georgia State University Library's “Planning Atlanta: A New City in the Making, 1930s–1990s” collection is transforming a once seldom used and disconnected assortment of city planning maps and city planning documents into an organized and sought-after interactive digital collection. By digitizing and collating this material into a distinct digital collection and creating meaningful descriptive metadata, this once largely hidden collection is now easily discoverable. Seeking to move beyond the traditional digital library model of simply providing digital equivalents of tangible objects, the Planning Atlanta digital collection has been developed with the goal of providing multiple ways for users to access and engage with these maps. This collection not only provides users with traditional access to digitized maps and full text publications, the Planning Atlanta collection also provides users with direct access to georectified TIFF images and also offers users the option to view each map as a Google Maps– and Google Earth–tiled overlay. Tailored specifically to substantially augment the usefulness of these maps for both research and teaching, these interactive and dynamic collection features allow this rich spatial content to be easily used by both expert GIS users and non-GIS users.