Displaying Maps Clearly Online

Today we’d like to share some exciting progress we’ve made on displaying georeferenced maps clearly online. In collaboration with the Library Software Engineering Team, we’ve been fine-tuning this process over the past several months. In short, we took some scanned historical Atlanta maps, georeferenced them, and overlaid them on a modern map using Geoserver and Leaflet. Unfortunately, they were terribly blurry unless zoomed to the maximum resolution. After a lot of research and trial-and-error, we now have maps that display clearly at all zoom levels.

blurry_to_clear_map

Jay Varner (Library Software Engineer, Sr.) and I (Megan Slemons, GIS Librarian) have shared our findings at conferences this spring, and they are summarized in two blog posts on the Software Engineering team blog (and cross-posted here). Read about our journey below – we hope these steps will save others some trouble, and we are always looking for suggestions to further optimize this process!