Urban Planning Resources: Images, Maps, & GIS

Included here are licensed commercial sources, publicly available collections, and images digitized from resources in the KU libraries, museums, and academic departments. Information and terms of use for each collection is found in the listing.

One of the most comprehensive image resources licensed by KU is ARTstor with more than 1 million images on a wide-range of topics. This guide introduces the resource and helps users learn to find, download, save, print, organize, and share images

LibGuide prepared by KU Libraries' GIS specialist, Rhonda Houser. The guide covers geographic information systems, GIS, geospatial data, mapping, visualization, spatial analysis, geocoding, GIS training, and GIS software.

Information prepared by the KU Libraries' Map Librarian, Scott McEathron, about on campus and web-based resources.

A collection of over 5000 digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world, available to students, researchers and educators on the web. The images have been scanned from original slides or drawn from documents in the public domain. Researchers can search for buildings by country, city, style, title, architect, date of construction, as well as other fields.

Documents achievements in architecture, engineering, and design in the United States and its territories through a comprehensive range of building types and engineering technologies. With more than 350,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs, and written histories for more than 35,000 historic structures and sites dating from Pre-Columbian times to the twentieth century.

A collaborative effort that is easily accessible for display on the Web, as products and services, and as downloadable data. The geographic information includes orthoimagery (aerial photographs), elevation, geographic names, hydrography, boundaries, transportation, structures, and land cover.

From the Perry-Castaneda Map Collection at the Univ. of Texas, Austin

Digitized version of the maps documenting Kansas cities and towns from 1883 through 1922 (which are now in the public domain); comprising 5,245 images, the collection is searchable by city, county and date. The complete collection of Sanborn maps for Kansas is available in both paper and microfilm in the Spencer Research Library. The maps consists of a uniform series of large-scale maps depicting the commercial, industrial, and residential sections of some cities and towns in the state of Kansas. The maps were designed to assist fire insurance agents in determining the degree of hazard associated with a particular property and therefore show the size, shape, and construction of dwellings, commercial buildings, and factories as well as fire walls, locations of windows and doors, sprinkler systems, and types of roofs. The maps also indicate widths and names of streets, property boundaries, building use, and house and block numbers. They show the locations of water mains, giving their dimensions, and of fire alarm boxes and hydrants. Sanborn maps are thus an unrivaled source of information about the structure and use of buildings in American cities.