Old Maps Online

oldmapsonline.org

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A search engine for historical maps aggregated from major collections worldwide, allowing geographic and time-period filtering across hundreds of thousands of maps.

Old Maps Online is a search engine for historical maps held in collections around the world. You search on a modern map by place and filter by time period, and results link out to the institutions that hold the scans.

It does not host most maps itself, so access, quality and reuse rules depend on each library or archive. It is a fast way to see how a place looked in different centuries, for family history, local history and map lovers.

Why it is useful

Solves the problem of historical maps being scattered across dozens of institutional collections with incompatible search interfaces. A single query returns maps of the same location across multiple centuries from multiple archives, making it invaluable for tracking how cities, coastlines, and borders changed over time. The zoom quality on most maps is excellent.

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