Welcome on sites about historical maps of Czech lands! You can find here a lot of information about historical maps of Bohemia, Moravia a Silesia which were drawn by an individual cartographer, starting with the oldest map of a part of the Czech republic produce by Mikulas Klaudyán in 1518. On the other hand, the youngest map piece which you can find on these sites is Palacký´s map of Bohemia from 1876. Right now there are 15 most widely-known maps. The database should be still growing to become absolutely complete. Maps are divided into three categories: Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia in accordance with the area they display. You can choose the categories in upper menu. Information about each map is structured in the following schema: author, title of the map, dimension and scale, map design, topography, information about the original and about its copies. Unfortunately, we couldn´t find all the information or a map example for all maps. Map exmaples are in the centre of attention of these web pages. In order to be able to access these historical maps via internet it is was necessary to digitize all the paper maps first. We used reprints of the original maps for scanning. These reprints were mostly miniatures of the originals, coloured in various ways and retouched for the most part. Maps were scanned by a wide-format scanner in 500 DPI (dots per inch) resolution. All the details in the map are sufficiently readable and sharp in this resolution. Scanned maps were saved in TIF (Tagged Image File) format afterwards without any compresion. For displaying a raster map in such a big resolution was as the most proper and available chosen the Zoomify application. Through this application you can do the most common operations via internet browser without the necessity of instalation any other software or plug-in. By using the seven buttons you can easily zoom in and zoom out, move in all directions or display the whole overview of the map. It´s working that way that the final picture is always generated from several small pieces of the rast map which means that you never work with the whole raster image. That is why the displaying of maps should be quick. A high-quality presentation of the I., II. a III. Military Survey, the Müller´s Survey of Bohemia and Moravia and a presentation of the Stabile Cadaster you can find on the web sites of the Geoinformatics laboratory of the University of J.E.Purkyně in Ústí nad Labem. The individual map sheets are also viewed through the Zoomify application. As a experiment the Aretin map (1619) was georeferenced in to the JTSK system (System of Unified Czech Trigonometrical Cadastral Net) and saved afterwards to a mapserver environment. Through this mapserver it is possible to display several vector layers with geographical data of the Czech republic with the Aretin´s map in background. You can find there a layer with the border of the Czech republic, a layer with towns with 5000 and more inhabitans and a layer with rivers and water surfaces. By switching these layers on and off you can for example compare which towns on the map are at the same position as in reality or how a river-basin has changed. However, it´s only an experiment and the result can not be taken deadly seriously :) These web site is the result of a diploma thesis at the Department of mapping and cartography at the Czech Technical University in 2006.