If you need maps of Great Britain, think about using Digimap – Digimap delivers maps and map data from official sources to UK higher education, and you can easily create authoratative location and site maps.  There are five different collections available to members of the University of Reading:

• Digimap – contemporary Ordnance Survey maps and data, ranging from small scale base maps to detailed large scale plans
• Historic Digimap – historic Ordnance Survey maps from 1840 to the 1990s.  They can be compared side-by-side to help follow changes in the landscape
• Geology Digimap – geology maps and data from the British Geological Survey (BGS)
• Environment Digimap – landcover maps for different years, from the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology (CEH).  This collection includes scans of the Dudley Stamp Land Use maps from the 1930s
• Aerial Digimap – contemporary aerial photography from Getmapping plc.

You will need to register to use Digimap – it is quick and easy to do.  Follow the instructions on our Digimap page.

Once registered, you can select and print maps of Great Britain using the ‘Roam’ interface from whichever collection you want.  Roam includes tools to annotate your maps, and you can save them for future use. You can also measure distances and areas. Printing is possible at sizes from A4 up to A0, or you can save it as a pdf or a jpg to insert in Word.

If you prefer, you can download the map data to use in a Geographical Information System such as ArcGIS or QGIS.

Extensive help is available from the Digimap Resource Centre and from the Digimap YouTube channel, or you can email your Site Representative – Judith Fox, the Map Librarian.

To find out more about maps in the Library see our Maps guide.

This is one of a series of tips to help save you time and effort finding or using information

This tip was written by Judith Fox, Map Librarian