Digitising the AWM’s Mega Maps

Go behind the scenes with the AWM’s digitisation team as they carefully capture and preserve some of the largest maps in the collection, revealing the skill, detail, and care involved in bringing these remarkable records to life online.

Bringing giant maps into the digital age

The Memorial has been digitising some of the largest maps in the Memorial’s collection. Affectionately referred to by staff as the “mega maps”, they typically range between two and three meters in width. Digitising maps of this size presents a unique set of challenges that the team navigate with skill and precision.

Getting ready: Handling maps at scale

Scanning a mega map differs significantly from scanning smaller maps, primarily mega maps exceed the dimensions of our largest scanner, the METIS. To enable capture, mega maps are scanned in sections, with supports such as an additional bench and paper weights used to keep the map secure and stable.

The METIS is ideally suited to this task due to its ability to capture large objects with complex detail and texture. The METIS vacuum board or plexiglass is used to gently flatten the map during scanning.

Piecing it all together

Once the multiple scans of a mega map have been captured, the team use a post-processing technique in Adobe Photoshop known as “stitching” to digitally combine the images into a single, seamless image. A second team member then conducts quality assurance, ensuring the digital surrogate accurately reflects the physical map. The final steps involve ingesting the digital surrogate into the Digital Asset Management System, cataloguing the record in the Collection Management System, and releasing the record to the Memorial's website.

A close look: Monash's maps of the Western Front

The team have recently digitised two mega maps from the Sir John Monash map collection, depicting the Western Front during General Monash’s command of the Australian Corps in 1918.

Mapping St-Quentin and Maricourt

The first mega map, depicting the area around St-Quentin and Maricourt in France, is 2.4 meters in length and 1.9 meters in width. It details roads, railways, boundaries, buildings, trenches, rivers, and vegetation. The digitisation process involved capturing 12 images in total, six images of the map graphic folio (front) and six images of the verso (back). These images were stitched together to create a high-resolution digital reproduction of the map.

Mapping Nieuport to Reims

The second mega map is 2.5 meters in length and 2.1 meters in width. The map covers the areas around Nieuport and Reims in Belgium, and contains a lot of fine detail, depicting roads, railways, boundaries, buildings, trenches, rivers, and vegetation. Digitisation required taking 16 images in total, eight of the map graphic folio (front), and eight of the verso (back). Meticulous effort over many hours went into stitching the 16 images together to ensure each section lined up accurately.

Preserving the past

Digitising mega maps plays an important role in their long‑term preservation. Due to their size, these maps are stored rolled on cylinder boards and hung horizontally in a bespoke compactus within the collection store. Unrolling and re‑rolling them often requires multiple staff. Although digitisation staff are trained in safe paper handling, working with objects of this scale and fragility inevitably carries risks to collection safety. Creating a digital surrogate reduces the need for physical handling, helping to preserve the Memorial’s unique collections.

From storage to screen: expanding access

The digitisation of mega maps is an essential component of the Memorial's ongoing project to digitise some 1,900 selected maps in our collections. Through the process of digitisation, collections once only accessible by visiting the Memorial’s Research Centre can be accessed online.

Further reading:

METIS and Monash – An Inside Look into the Memorial’s Map Digitisation Project