North Carolina Maps is one of the special digital collections for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, housed under their auspicious Documenting the American South program. NC Maps is pretty self explanatory - its a work in progress that hopes to digitize about 1500 maps of the Tar Hell state dating from the 16th century to the 1960s, all held at the three largest archives in NC; the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Outer Banks History Center.
Collection Principles: This project is currently the beta version, release July 2008. They hope to be completed by 2010. The selection criteria, and digitization and cataloging principles are explicitly stated on the "about" page, and are both comprehensive and concrete. A complete list of maps scheduled for digitization, their place of holding, their date, and their status is available in PDF format.
Object Characteristics: The objects can be browsed according to a number of criteria; data, location, subject, type, etc. they can also be searched for a specific keyword. UNC is using ContentDM for this collection, so all maps are displayed at high resolutions and can be zoomed, rotated and clipped. Their size is displayed as a percentage of the "real" size of the object - most objects can be zoomed in 4 or 5 orders of magnitude. Since these are maps, the resolution can get exceedingly high, and the objects are ultimately very large files. All objects are displayed on their own page including text documenting the object and containing the object's full metadata.
Metadata: Full metadata for each object is included on the page with it's graphic, including the location of the original object, its dimensions, and the authority for it's digitization (the Library Services and Technology Act, distributed through the State Library of North Carolina)
Intended Audience: Clearly, like all the DocSouth collections, this is meant primarily as a free public history resource for the people of the State of North Carolina, or anyone with an interest in southern geography or history. All of the collection is freely viewable with a web browser. Unlike many collections I've been blogging about lately, it's also meant to stand alone, instead of to supplement the somewhat obscure paper resources it utilizes.
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