General Information

Air Photo Digitization Project

The University of Waterloo Map Library is working an air photo digitization project that will place you on a 70-year old map. By using a third party resource that offers familiar streets and points of interests, you will be able to see how specific parts of towns looked like back in the 1930s and 1940s. Using Google Earth, you can find your home today and with a simple click find out how the land was used in 1930, and 1945-47. Combining the old and the new will place Tim Horton’s in the middle of a farmers field; will place the highway on top of an old stone school house and subdivisions on a gravel pit. Find the long lost forests, marshes, and small towns and make use of archival images that tell the story of time.In a few months the Map Library will provide access to these photos of Kitchener, Waterloo and surrounding areas in a variety of image formats for download: PDF, Tiff, GeoTiff and KMZ (for Google Earth). Providing these images in a georeferenced format will enable the GIS and non GIS users to use them in a variety of ways. Users can add the images into a GIS program such as ArcGIS and overlay their own datasets or they can open up the PDF and simply enjoy the photo for its natural quality. See article in News @ Your Library http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/newsatlib/080110/aerialphotography.html