How to outsource scanning and georeferencing maps?

Question

We have some historical paper maps and we want to get them scanned and geo-referenced and ultimately make a seamless map for a particular time. What vendors supply this service? (I have found Fuzecore and DDS so far from a Google search.) What experience have you had with them? In general,

• How does one go about evaluating these vendors--what criteria should be used to assess the quality, timeliness, and price of their work?

• What kinds of issues might arise in outsourcing this? What are the risks?

To keep this thread within the StackExchange format, please provide objective and well-supported answers only.

Answer 1

I would suggest talking to your local university or college. I work in a Geography department at a university in the geospatial data centre and we are doing a similar project with aerial photography for our local city. Universities can hire students, or make it apart of the class work. Many profs like the chance to tie their teaching to real world applications which provides skills for the student's resume.

Answer 2

If you are looking for a local solution, consider contacting architectural firms in your area. Very often these firms have (the increasingly rare) high quality, large format scanners needed to scan in your maps. Once the maps are digitized, you can georeference and mosaic them yourself or send the data off to be processed. I recommend looking into this approach if your maps are especially rare, historic and/or delicate.

Answer 3

I've had this done at a local print shop, though they just did the scanning, I combined the images (they could have done this too but I was in a hurry and had the ability to do it) and georeferenced the resulting image.

The most important thing to me when I had it done was that the original maps not be damaged in any way, since they didn't belong to me. The key to that was not using a roll-fed scanner, which can tear old paper as it feeds through. A roll scanner can also distort the final image if the roller skips at all while feeding the paper through. The shop I used used a large-format flatbed scanner like this:

The bed at the bottom uses a little air pressure to pull the paper down and keep it flat without damaging it.