New USGS Topo Map Web Viewer

[wphiii]

Didn't see a thread about this, but the USGS has just dramatically redone the web viewer for their topographic map library going back to the 1880s so that any map you could possibly want is easy to access.

It's going insanely slow right now but once things calm down a bit it could be a really useful tool for a lot of historic road-related things.

http://ngmdb.usgs.gov/maps/TopoView/

[NE2]

How does it compare to http://historicalmaps.arcgis.com/usgs/ ?

[Bruce]

How does it compare to http://historicalmaps.arcgis.com/usgs/ ?

The ArcGIS one is certainly prettier, with its visual timeline, but the USGS one doesn't require downloading and extracting from ZIP files. The USGS one has JPEGs ready to view online.

[empirestate]

It's not exactly new; TopoView has been around a little while as the interface for the National Geologic Map Database (hence the URL) and has been my favorite since its inception, because it does the best job of showing what maps exist where, and lets you view them in-browser. By contrast, I've always found the ArcGIS platform to be a little clunky.

However, with this 2.0 release, it's the first time they've started pushing it as the main database for the historic collection from the USGS store. It's gotten a lot of press on Twitter and such, and is consequently running quite slow from all the increased traffic.

Also new with this release is the rather attractive base map layer, which surprisingly seems to be based on OSM data rather than National Map datasets...

[empirestate]

...and it's officially been broken for a few days now. Nice job everyone.