[talk-au] MMBW plan dates

[keith maguire]

In the discussion of the Adelaide out-of-copyright street maps BlueMM said:


> BTW, some of the MMBW index maps have dates like 1977 hand written on them,
> which means they aren't free till 2028!! The highest zoom maps I have seen
> are
> very old, and are free of copyright (there might be 1955+ in there). Even
> worse,
> if it isn't dated, it probably "unpublished" and the NLA site mentions it
> might
> have perpetual copyright!!!
>

Conveniently at the moment I'm one of the maps librarians in the State
Library of Victoria so I can clarify this a bit -- in terms of the dating of
things -- I am no expert on copyright.

The Main plan, which shows all the suburbs, and the Index plans are all from
the late 60s, early 70s (There's two copies here, I've just had a look
through the non-digitised set and they were pretty much all received in
1971).  The bit in pencil: "821.09 AKB 1970-" is the call number for the
index plans.

The highest zoom maps (40 foot to the inch) range from about 1895 to about
1950 with most of them earlier in that range rather than later -- in general
the higher the number of the plan the later it was done.  I'm pretty sure
that they are all dated (look for the Engineer-in-Chief's signature - it's
usually just under that).  I'm currently working through the 3000s as part
of the digitising project and they're pretty much all from 1930 - there are
only a handful that I could see from 1950, and that was the latest date I
saw.  We've nearly finished digitising the library's entire collection of 40
foot to the inch plans.  If you see a four digit number written in pencil on
the plan it will almost certainly be the plan number rewritten on a corner
to help us find a particular number when going through the drawers.

The library also holds another two smaller sequences of MMBW plans: 400 foot
to the inch, from around 1933; and 160 foot to the inch, from around 1896.
These haven't been digitised yet but probably will be in the not too distant
future.  There is also another sequence yet again, at 1:2500 scale but these
are all from the 70s or 80s.

Cheers

Keith
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-au/attachments/20090121/f7d3a05c/attachment.html>