Find maps to georeference

Find historical maps in the digital collections of libraries, archives, and museums, and bring them into Allmaps Editor.

Browse collections

These collection portals from partner institutions are good places to start:

• Bibliothèque nationale de France — Gallica
• Bodleian Libraries — Maps and Atlases
• Eesti Rahvusraamatukogu (National Library of Estonia) — DIGAR
• Indiana University Libraries — Digital Collections
• Leiden University Libraries — Digital Collections
• Leventhal Map & Education Center — Digital Collections
• National Library of Wales — Maps
• New York Public Library — Maps
• Stanford Libraries — Scanned Maps
• Texas A&M University Libraries — Digital Collections
• TU Delft Library — Map Room
• Universiteitsbibliotheek van Amsterdam — Maps
• University of Chicago Library — Mapping Chicagoland
• Universitätsbibliothek Wien — Digital Collections
• Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam — Geoplaza historical maps
• Yale University Library — Maps

You can also use maps from other institutions that publish their images through IIIF.

Find the IIIF URL

Open a map’s record in the collection portal and look for a IIIF link, often shown with the IIIF logo or in a sharing menu. Copy the IIIF Manifest URL or the IIIF Image Service URL, rather than the address of the collection’s web page.

The IIIF resource guides explain where to find Manifest URLs in many collection portals.

You can also use detektIIIF, a browser extension for Chrome and Firefox that detects IIIF resources on web pages. It can help you find a map’s IIIF Manifest URL while browsing a collection.

Once you have the URL, open Allmaps Editor and paste it into the input field. Follow the georeferencing guide to draw a mask and add control points.

Find maps through the API

Allmaps ingests the map collections of partner institutions, recording their IIIF resources so you can find them through the REST API. The images themselves remain hosted by the institutions.

Use georeferenced=false to find images that have not yet been georeferenced in Allmaps. You can search across the images in Allmaps or within a single institution’s collection:

Example	API URL
Images that have not been georeferenced	https://api.allmaps.org/images?georeferenced=false&limit=10
Images from the Bibliothèque nationale de France that have not been georeferenced	https://api.allmaps.org/organizations/669272abb8d042cf/images?georeferenced=false&limit=10

The limit=10 parameter requests up to ten images. To find images from another institution, look it up in the list of partner organizations and add ?georeferenced=false&limit=10 to its images URL. See the REST API reference for the full documentation and all available query parameters.

Each image’s uri field contains its IIIF Image Service URL. Copy this URL into Allmaps Editor to start georeferencing.

To discover maps that people have already georeferenced with Allmaps, see Discover maps in Allmaps.