Free Geography Tools

Making Maps posts about HistCarto, a site with 4000 searchable and viewable historic maps of France, dating from the 17th to 19th centuries. The site is in French, so you may want to have Google Translator handy if you don’t speak the language. But for a quick view of some of the maps:

• Click on the “Acces a la base” link at the right to go to the database page
• Click on “Recherche” (Search) at left, then “Simple”
• Click on the “Type de carte” (type of map) dropdown, then choose a type of map you’d like to see; many types will be obvious to many non-French speakers. In the example below, I’ve select “Geologie”, which oddly enough is geology:

• Other search options are “Mot(s) du titre” – words in the title; “Auteur” – author; “Lieu de conservation” – source of the map; “Aire geographique” – geographic area; “Technique” – whether the map is a printed map (“Carte imprimee annotee” or hand-drawn (“Carte manuscrite”). Caveat: my high school French is a bit rusty :).
• Click on “Rechercher” to retrieve a list of maps of that type:

• Click on a listing to retrieve the info page for that map; click on the map image at the bottom of the info page to bring up a pop-up Flash Zoomify viewer with the map loaded:

Note: The map is of a region in France, but was created in Germany, hence some of the German names.

No downloadable versions of the maps, unfortunately.