Two out-of-copyright maps of Ireland now available for OSM usage.

Hi,

Thanks to the National Library of Scotland (NLS), we now have two maps
of Ireland available for OSM usage.

These two maps are:
Bartholomew Quarter Inch to the mile (1: 253440) 1940
British War Office One Inch to the mile (1:63,360) 1941-43 - (G.S.G.S. 4136)

Chris Fleet, the senior map curator at NLS supplied me with high
quality scans of the above maps which I then georeferenced. These maps
are now added to their large collection of British and Irish maps at
http://geo.nls.uk/maps/ .

While my georeferencing isn’t perfect, hopefully these maps should
prove very useful to the Irish OSM community as a source of
placenames, county boundaries, missing roads and spotting other gaps
in the map.

The Bartholomew maps is available up to zoom 13 and the GSGS is
available up to zoom 15. The two maps should already be available as
imagery layers in JOSM. The GSGS map should appear in Potlatch2 over
the next few days.

I’ve also set up a page where you can view these layers at
http://maps.openstreetmap.ie/oocmaps.html.

The original GSGS map was supplied as one image with the 76 sheets
already stitched together which proved problematic to accurately
georeference. We’ve recently obtained the scans for each individual
sheet so we’re working on an improved version of the GSGS map which
we’re planning to work on over the winter.

Enjoy!

Excellent. Great work. Thanks for the heads up.

(This could be just me, but those old-school maps are things of beauty)

The GSGS map is now live in Potlatch2 under the name “Ireland - NLS Historic Maps”

see http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potlatch_2/Primer#Background_Image for how to load and realign background imagery.

Potlatch2 is currently configured to use a source tag of “NLS Historic Maps” - there’s a shortcut to apply this quickly to a way - select the way and press “b”.

This will also allow us to monitor usage using the Irish taginfo instance: http://taginfo.openstreetmap.ie/search?q=NLS+Historic+Maps#values