Scanning old maps, rolling your own new maps

The Map Room links to Hipkiss' Scanned Old Maps. The site owner is scanning and posting maps from books in his collection, like this map of London, suburbs, railways and postal codes, from the 1922 Bartholomew Pocket Atlas. He also has links to other online collections of maps old and new, and offers an RSS feed, so you can easily find out when he has a new map available for your perusal.

There's a new blog called Mapping Hacks, which is also the name of an upcoming book from O'Reilly Associates. The focus of blog and book is the democratization of mapmaking. I've long had the yearning to make my own maps, particularly for political purposes, but the tools for the task have been expensive and cumbersome to learn. That's all changing, and the open source revolution is behind the change.

A couple more cool map links:

Here's a collection of historical maps of Ireland. These maps will be especially helpful for someone working on Irish genealogy. The collection includes maps of Irish baronies, which have been hard to find outside specialist libraries.

And here's an online British Museum exhibit called "The Unveiling of Britain," revealing through maps the evolution of the understanding of Britain's shape from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1600.

Hat tip for all of the above to The Map Room.