Hi All, I am running a GoFundMe campaign to purchase the historical 1:50k topographic map series for Namibia.
Any support would be appreciated: https://www.gofundme.com/namibian-topographic-maps The map sheets were produced during the 1970s and 1980s by the Surveyor-General of South West Africa, along with the South African Chief Directorate Surveys & Mapping. They comprehensively mapped South West Africa and produced 1218 1:50000 Topographic Map sheets covering the whole country. It is now very difficult to find a complete set of these sheets, thankfully a commercial project in the mid 2000s were able to collect and scan these invaluable sheets and they are willing to sell me a digital copy of their scans. Namibia gained its independence in 1990 from South Africa and some time later the South African government mapping agency gifted all their Namibian sheets to the new Namibian government mapping agency. It is now unclear who own the rights for these sheets. Both governments seem to claim the other owns the rights, with neither assert them. The sheets have been freely used by humanitarian organisations in the past. It is my belief that we may freely use the sheets for deriving information for OpenStreetMap mapping purposes. We already have permission to use the South African topo series see https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright & https://htonl.dev.openstreetmap.org/ngi-tiles/ I have some samples here: https://grant.dev.openstreetmap.org/namibia-topo-50k/ and a scaled copy of a full sheet here: https://grant.dev.openstreetmap.org/namibia-topo-50k/1713AD_Okangwati_Ed-1-utm_1980.jpg Kind regards, Grant _______________________________________________ Talk-africa mailing list Talk-africa@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-africa
