Scholars Portal and members of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) Geo Community are pleased to announce the release of a collection of Second World War military maps via Scholars GeoPortal, a shared geospatial data repository.

In commemoration of the 74th anniversary of the D-day landings, the OCUL Geo Community, Wilfrid Laurier University’s Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies (LCMSDS), the University of Waterloo, and McMaster University, have collaborated to release these historically significant maps to the public. The project aims to improve access to these maps by making them freely available online and offering visual exploration and download through the Scholars GeoPortal platform.
 
These 87 maps of various scales were originally part of a collection created by the Allied powers in advance of the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. The collection includes various materials such as defence overprints, tank “going” maps, and flooding overprints. It primarily concentrates on those areas of Western Europe that were the focus of Allied forces in the initial months following the D-Day landings.
 
The maps were acquired by the Laurier Centre for Military, Strategic and Disarmament Studies (LCMSDS) in 1991 from the Department of Defence, Canada, and were recently digitized and georeferenced at the University of Waterloo Geospatial Centre. Sheet-level description was done with help from the University of Waterloo Geospatial Centre, McMaster University’s Lloyd Reeds Map Collection, as well as the expertise of many others in the OCUL Geo Community. Digital scans of these maps, along with other historical military maps are available from the McMaster University Library.
 
The digital collection can be accessed through the Scholars GeoPortal by clicking on the Military and Intelligence subject category, or by searching for “Second World War.”
 
For further questions contact: help [at] scholarsportal.info