[OR_Archaeology] ATLAS OF HISTORICAL COUNTY BOUNDARIES AVAILABLE ONLINE

[Susan White]

ATLAS OF HISTORICAL COUNTY BOUNDARIES AVAILABLE ONLINE

The Newberry Library is pleased to announce the completion and release of its Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries, a dataset that covers every day-to-day change in the size, shape, location, name, organization, and attachment of each U.S. county and state from the creation of the first county in 1634 through 2000. 

The data are organized by state and are available online in four versions: viewable, interactive maps (electronic analogues to printed maps) on which the historical lines have been plotted against a background of the modern county network; downloadable shapefiles for use in geographic information systems (GIS); downloadable KMZ files for use with Google Earth; downloadable and printable PDF files (each full-page frame shows a map of a different version of each county, with the historical boundaries displayed against a background of the modern county network).

Supplementing the polygons and maps for each state are chronologies, commentary on historical problems, long and short metadata documents, and a bibliography. The Newberry Library is the copyright holder; all files of the Digital Atlas of Historical County Boundaries are free for use under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Creative Commons License. 

Queries should be addressed to scholl at newberry.org. The Website for the Atlas is publications.newberry.org/ahcbp.