Making a map: make a start

Mapannapolis offers volunteers a platform, a few rules, and a few tools. Self-organized interest groups as well as single individuals choose their own topics.

Our first map, an inventory of County buildings and structures compiled by the Province of Nova Scotia, was translated into a digital map. Containing over 2800 records, the work had been completed in the early 1980s and available only on paper. Building records looked like this:

Typical inventory sheet for the survey of notable buildings and structures in Annapolis County.

In working toward an inter-active on-line map, first came matching the inventory sheets to Geo-located points on a paper map:

Coloured dots and post-it notes first.

Months later, all that raw data transformed to points on a clickable map:

We zoom in to select a community, and then an individual record.

Opening the record of interest, we discover that this house has been re-purposed as part of the Nova Scotia Department of Community, Culture, and Heritage museum inventory:

Subsequently, more than 400 additional buildings and structures were added as the project team heard from property owners not on the map.

An Annapolis County built-heritage inventory which had been created and committed to paper, and seen by almost nobody, is now available on-demand thanks to a dedicated and thorough self-organized, community mapping team.

See and explore more of mapannapolis.ca here.