Topoview, a product of the U.S. Geological Survey, lets you access and download maps
free of charge from USGS historical topographic map collection, published between 1884 and
2006.
Getting Around There are a few ways to navigate around the
archives of over 178,000 maps.
In TopoView, pan is enabled by default, so you can click anywhere on the map, hold the
left mouse button, and drag the mouse.
To zoom into an area, we offer standard zoom tools on the left side of the interface.
However, most users find it easier to simply hold down the shift key and drag a box over
their area of interest, or use the mouse scroll wheel for zooming in or out.
Use the next and back arrows to toggle back and forth between areas you zoomed to previously.
For users with touch-enabled devices, a simple multi-touch “pinch” gesture can be used
to zoom into and out of an area.
Location Zooming When you want to zoom to a specific location,
such as your house, town, or larger area, use the location tool on the right side of
the interface.
There, you can enter general information, like a zip code, town name, or geographic
feature, or more specific information, such as your street address, or lat/lon coordinate
pair.
Where Am I?
To zoom to your current location, use the geolocation tool on the left side of the interface.
If you have geolocation services enabled, you’ll be instantly zoomed to your current
location.
This is useful for accessing historical maps located just beneath your feet.
Accessing the Maps When you click any one of the colored map
boxes, a map information window will appear in the lower left corner of the screen.
The selected map in the interface will be highlighted red.
Along the left side of the window, you’ll see the map name and citation information
about the particular edition that’s being shown.
In this example, we’ve clicked on the San Francisco quandrangle from 1915.
You’ll notice from the citation information that this particular map was printed in 1947.
In some cases, reprints may vary slightly from the original edition.
Later in the video, we’ll see how to compare editions of a map through table-view.
Downloading a Map In the center of the map information window,
you’ll see a list of map downloads.
For each map, we’ve provided a variety of individual file formats in order to meet a
range of user needs.
These formats include high-resolution JPGs, Google Earth KMZ, GEOPDF, and GEOTIFF.
Simply click any one of them to download.
On the right of the window, you’ll see a preview of the map.
Click the image to access a high-resolution image of the map.
Next to the preview image, you’ll see a counter showing the number of maps that were
published at that particular point.
Above the preview image, you’ll see a number of controls that let you zoom or pan to the
selected map.
Map Scales When you launch topoView, you’ll see a grid
of yellow boxes.
These are the 1:250,000 topographic map series, which are the least detailed of the collection
and cover all of the conterminous United States and Alaska.
On the right side of the viewer, you’ll see a map scale selector, which will let you
choose which scale to view.
The scale numbers represent common USGS topographic map series scales.
In order to provide a compact, but useful scale selector, we combined maps of similar
scales into the bins you see in the selector box.
In this example, by clicking on the radio selector buttons in the map scale box, we
can see the distribution of maps of different scales around the Seattle area.
The smaller the map scale number, the more detailed the map is, but the less area it
covers.
You can also see all maps of all scales by clicking the Show All button.
Notice that as we select different map scales, the map records counter at the bottom of the
interface updates to show the number of maps currently available.
Timeline Much like the scale selector, which allows
you to choose maps by scale, the timeline filter at the top of the view allows you to
select maps by time.
Simply grab the selector and slide along the bar to filter maps by time.
As the slider is moved, the year callout updates to identify what the year being shown is.
As each end of the slider can be moved independently, it’s helpful when you’re looking for a
set of maps published in a specific range of dates.
As we’ll see later in the film, powerful query tools can be used by using both the
timeline and scale selector tools.
The timeline tool is also useful for tracking the evolution of topographic mapping at the
USGS throughout history.
Map Records Table As we’ve seen, when you click on a map,
the map counter shows the number of maps that were published at that location.
If you want to get more information on those maps, you can view those maps in a map records
table by clicking the map counter button or the map locator icon above the preview image.
The map records table makes it easier to inspect and compare maps at a certain point or maps
found through the search tool.
Simply hover or click each map to see additional information in the map information window.
Note that the extent of the selected record is marked in red on the interface.
Sorting & Filtering Table Records can be sorted and filtered to
make browsing more efficient.
Click on the column header of any field to sort the table by that field.
Clicking column headers multiple times sorts the table by ascending or descending order.
The table can be sorted by multiple fields by holding down the shift key and clicking
multiple column headers.
To filter table records, enter text in the filter results input box at the bottom of
the records table.
The filter searches for character sets anywhere in the table record.
Overlapping Maps Since the historical map record contains multiple
maps of the same area over time, there will naturally be maps that overlap.
When overlapping map boxes are clicked, the most recent map with the most detailed scale
will be shown by default in the map information window.
Overlapping older maps can be easily access by the Table View.
Searching Maps If you know the name of the map you’re looking
for, you can enter it in the search tool on the right hand side of the interface.
You can enter the full name or part of the name.
When a search term is entered, the map information window and a populated table record will appear.
Only the map boxes that meet your search term will appear in the interface.
Clear the search terms to restore the map boxes that were removed by your search filter.
Note that your search results are limited by the timeline and scale options you’ve
applied.
Putting It All Together For a final example, let’s say I wanted
to find historical maps of the Chicago area prior to 1930.
To quickly zoom there, I’ll enter Chicago in my location tool and choose Chicago, IL,
from the list of suggestions.
Since I’m only interested in maps published prior to 1930, I’ll adjust my timeline slider,
effectively only showing maps published between 1880 and 1930.
Next I’ll choose Show All in the map scale selector box, since I want to see all available
historical maps for this location.
Comparing the colors of the map boxes shown on the interface with the map scale legend,
I can see that there are two map scale ranges, 1:24,000 and 1:62,000, that were published
in this area during my selected timeframe.
If I were interested in isolating the scale ranges, I could simply select the button of
the scale of my choice.
Notice that when individual map scales are selected, map names appear.
This can be useful if you’re looking for a particular map name, or if you’re looking
to identify the map names in an area.
Clicking on the city of Chicago shows me that there are 10 additional maps published of
this location.
To preview these maps, I’ll launch my table view, where I can hover or click the records
to compare map information.
When I find a map I like, I can jump down to the map information window to download
or preview the map, then move back to the table to interact with the additional maps.
When I hover between a 1:24,000 and 1:62,000 map record, I can see that the 1:62,000 covers
a larger area, which makes sense because it has a less-detailed scale.
Since I’m looking for a single map that covers the city and neighboring suburbs, this
is my choice.
However, I’d like to find the oldest map from this set.
To do this, I’ll click on the scale column heading on my table and sort map scales in
descending order.
Then I’ll hold the shift key and sort the date column by ascending order, effectively
promoting the oldest 1:62,000 map to the top of my list.
I can see from the map table that the name of this map is the Chicago Quandrangle.
Say I want to inspect all maps from the historical record of the Chicago Quandrangle.
I could simply expand my timeline to include all available dates that span the collection.
When I click the same point, I can now see that there are 25 maps published at this location.
When I click the map table, I can see that there are both Englewood and Chicago maps
published at this location.
Since I’m only interested in the Chicago maps, I’ll type a “c” in my filter records
box.
Filtering happens dynamically as I type.
This effectively drops all Englewood map records from the table, as the letter “c” does
not appear in the name Englewood.
Notice too that my map record counter displays all available maps after I apply my filter.
So, in this case, I can see that there were 14 versions of the Chicago Quandrangle published
over time in the collection.
Additional sorting can be applied just like to a non-filtered table.
To clear the filter, I click the clear filter button on the right side of the Filter Record
box.
These are just some of the ways you can navigate through the historical map collection in topoView.
We invite you to explore the collection and download any of the maps, free of charge at
http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/maps/topoview.