University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Magazine

Wisconsin Emergency Management Images and Historic Materials WEM0221 Somerset tire fire, 1986 18 | LIBRARIES Fall 2015 agency partnerships. The Wisconsin Public Land Survey Records contains plat maps and the accompanying notebooks that resulted from the survey of Wisconsin conducted between 1832 and 1866 by the federal General Land Office. The digital collection was launched in 2003 and resurvey maps were added in 2010. It is an incredibly important geographic and historic resource, since this work established the essential patterns upon which land ownership and land use is based. According to Jaime Martindale, Map and Geospatial Data Librarian at the Arthur H. Robinson Map Library, “The survey notes and original plats offer the oldest ‘baseline’ dataset for researchers to begin their historic work, by showing the very first cartographic depiction of the public land survey system (Township, Range, Sections), accompanied by detailed descriptions of the vegetation, terrain, and hydrographic features in the field notes. In many cases, the early plats and survey notes in the BCPL collection provide the earliest pieces of information describing tracts of land across Wisconsin, which can be very personal and meaningful for people in academic research, professional, or family history settings.” The first 500 images will be joined by nearly 2,000 more photographs, with an antici ]Y

University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries Magazine | Page 18