The Moravian Library in Brno, Czech Republic, announces the results of the successful georeferencing contest, which was launched this year on the Staremapy.cz portal.

The crowdsourcing online event ran from July 8 to August 31, and a total of 2797 old maps were successfully georeferenced and processed by the online volunteers.

In less than two months, the participants working over the Internet from the comfort of their homes identified a total of 62205 location points in the scanned maps and connected them to modern locations. This effort, among other things, made it easier to discover the scanned old maps in the catalogues and international search databases and overlay them on top of modern maps - to compare the past with the present.

The new georeferenced maps from the Moravian Library and other domestic and foreign map collections can be found through the OldMapsOnline.org portal.

The OldMapsOnline project helps to make historical maps more accessible to the general public. A large number of maps are stored in the collections of Czech cultural heritage institutions, which have been undergoing digitalization in recent years.

The Czech National TV broadcasted a report about this georeferencing pilot and map collection of the Moravian Library in the TV news.