Trading digital maps

[bugo]

Many states publish downloadable maps on their respective DOT websites, often in PDF format. When these maps are updated, the new versions of the maps are uploaded and the old versions of the maps are removed from the websites. This means that some of the older editions of these maps are no longer available for download anywhere on the internet. Unless somebody happened to save them onto their personal computer, some of these files probably only exist in a hidden folder on the hard drive of some obsolete computer that has been forgotten about for decades and collecting dust underneath some books in the corner of a dusty closet in the basement of the state highway department headquarters. Some of the maps might be lost forever. I collect these files. I currently have more than 40,000 digital maps and road-related documents on my hard drive, and I am downloading new ones all the time. My collection takes up a little over 100 GB of storage and I have it redundantly backed up in several locations.  I have my browser set up to automatically save PDF and TIF files when I click on them. I also use a batch download plugin so I can save all of the maps in a particular folder with just a click or two. If I go to a website and download a county map, I download the maps for every county in the state. I like to download them and open them using an image reader program, because if for some reason I go offline, I can still access them.

A lot of the maps I have are no longer available online.  There are some states where I am missing certain editions of the maps because I didn't think to download that version while it was up, and I missed out on it. Does anybody else collect digital maps? I know some members of this forum have large archives of signing plans, so I assume that I'm not the only person who collects digital maps. We should set up some sort of system so we can share these files. We could trade maps back and forth, or we could set up a forum where you could list what you have for trade or any requests for maps that we might have. If somebody could afford the server space, we could create an online archive. Perhaps we could use a cloud service like Dropbox or Mega. Some of these files are quite rare and there might just be a few copies out there. As far as copyright goes, most of the maps I have were published by the state highway department and are likely in the public domain. I don't know what the laws are on old commercial maps, but I'll play the fair use card if need be and see what happens.

What do you think? I think it's a good idea, but implementing it might be logistically difficult. It would be a way to preserve a little bit of modern history. 

[Scott5114]

This seems like something that archive.org would be handy for. Some of them may already be available through their Internet Wayback Machine. Some states (like KS) put their maps in the public domain; those could be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Basically, my thought is to make these available to anyone, since there's good reasons that people outside the roadgeek community might want them.