ABSTRACT
Digitizing is still a major bottle-neck in the adoption and development of modern automated systems in cartography. One of the earliest international symposia in the field was titled ‘An international symposium on digitizing maps and charts’ (USGS 1969). Although it occurred 20 years ago, many of the problems identified are still problems in current production systems. This paper describes a coherent set of procedures developed to digitize diverse products during the Dane County Land Records Project. The first section covers software and editing procedures applicable to manual digitizing. The second section examines innovations which may alter some of the manual process, with particular reference to a specific low-cost scanner. The Dane County Land Records Project was a cooperative venture undertaken between June 1983 and December 1986 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The overall goal was to investigate automation of land records, particularly the products required to respond to a state mandate for a plan to control soil erosion. The cooperative structure of the project was more than a funding
mechanism. Most cooperators were interested in the project as an opportunity to assess the application of digital
Reprinted from 1987, International Journal of Geographical Information Systems, 1, pp. 265-277.
