Repost from 2012 (forwarded by Angie) -------- Original Message -------- Subject: RE: NIMA/NGA nautical charts online?? Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 20:10:10 -0500 From: Lee, Kent (EVIS) <[log in to unmask]> To: Maps, Air Photo, GIS Forum - Map Librarianship <[log in to unmask]> Michael, list: The NGA nautical charts have been quietly disappearing from official public distribution over the past two years. I think there have been a few waves of activity affecting both print and digital chart access. First, the FAA stopped their warehousing relationship with NGA and therefore distributing them as paper lithos via agents. (Some agents, including us, picked up complete sets of what the FAA was offering as of April 2010, and have been selling stocks of those ever since.) I believe that about this time the FDLP flow was also terminated, so presumably no US libraries have received any NGA charts (as opposed to NOAA charts, which continue). (Our information, by the way, is that with respect to the current-edition NGA charts, there are something like 4880 of them, and of these, some 280 were printed in 2010 and 330 in 2011.) I would be very interested to hear if US libraries--even LC or NARA--continue to receive new editions of NGA printed charts. Official distribution of NGA charts returned in 2011, to some degree, with a print-on-demand program which at its inception applied to the set of NGA charts as they existed at a point in time somewhere in 2010. In other words, most new editions of 2010 and apparently all of 2011 and going forward are not part of this program. It's not clear if this will change. But print-on-demand program has since been curtailed a bit to exclude all NGA charts in Regions 3 and 4 (generally speaking, Western Europe and northern Europe--some 600 charts), and hundreds of other charts have been line-item-vetoed out of access in the other global regions. The NGA nautical chart viewer (http://www.nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/NGAChartViewer.html) on the NOAA website generally reflects what is available in the official print-on-demand world, i.e., something less than 3000 charts. What appears to be driving this is the copyright concerns of the hydrographic agencies of various European countries, perhaps also Australia as well. Most if not all of these organizations have robust commercialization programs for their data, primarily to the navigation markets involving digital charts of various kinds. And a lot of NGA charts incorporate the content of foreign hydrographic agency charts. NGA does not wish to lose access to these local charts, whose fresh and authoritative data are essential to maintaining its own global chart program for its primary customers, namely the US DoD. And that access is threatened when the local chart producers see the NGA global chart series as being a threat to their revenue streams. I believe that it is this same basic concern which keeps most of the digital vector NGA charts (DNCs) out of the public domain. The primary alternatives are basically two: either use the latest available NGA nautical chart, which will probably be a 2010 or older edition, or if you need to have the latest edition, acquire the local version of a given nautical chart (UKHO/BA charts for the UK, SHOM charts for France, etc.). At this time neither option has a comprehensive online aspect to it, except perhaps with respect to metadata and thumbnails. Kent Kent D. Lee President and CEO East View Information Services, Inc. 10601 Wayzata Blvd. Minneapolis, MN USA 55305 Phone: +1.952.252.1201 Fax: +1.952.252.1202 [log in to unmask] www.eastview.com www.geospatial.com www.cartographic.com www.evmaplink.com ________________________________ From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Fry, Michael <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Friday, April 3, 2015 12:55 PM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: [MAPS-L] NGA Nautical charts Apparently I sounded this alarm to the list three years ago [subject = NIMA/NGA nautical charts online??] when I noticed the first group of charts had been removed from the NOAA/OCS site. Kent Lee of Eastview responded with a lengthy and useful explanation. mf On Fri, Apr 3, 2015 at 1:17 PM, Angela R Cope <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote: Thanks for sharing Michael. I don't recall hearing about this. We treat nautical charts like they're not copyrighted (giving high resolution tiffs to anyone who wants them). Can someone explain why NOAA/NGA maps are copyrighted? This is another reason to be careful about weeding collections simply because maps are online. These online map collections are so ephemeral. Angie AGSL opinions are my own ________________________________ From: Maps-L: Map Librarians, etc. <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> on behalf of Fry, Michael <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> Sent: Friday, April 3, 2015 10:11 AM To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> Subject: [MAPS-L] NGA Nautical charts Maybe this isn't news to you all, but I just discovered that the online index and chart viewer that gave the public access to hi-res versions of NGA's nautical charts of non-US coastal waters worldwide have been taken down from NOAA's site. (A couple of years ago they removed most charts due to copyright restrictions. Now they've removed them all.) See my correspondence with NOAA/OCS below... For the moment, some charts are still viewable online at www.nauticalchartsonline.com<http://www.nauticalchartsonline.com>. Not sure how long that'll last if copyright is the obstacle to free online access. mf Original message: Hi, Not too long ago, the nauticalcharts.noaa.gov<http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/> website hosted indexes to NGA nautical charts of non-US waters and hi-res versions of charts from the handful of regions (1, 5 and 9?) that they still had permission to make freely available. I don't see this resource available anymore. Has it moved, or has NGA removed all of their nautical charts from free public access? Thank you. Michael Fry Map Librarian and Map Editor National Geographic Society [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>; 202.857.7098<tel:202.857.7098> OCS response: Thank you for contacting NOAA. Due to copyright restrictions, we had to remove all NGA charts from our web site. -- Michael Fry Map Editor and Senior Map Librarian National Geographic Society 1145 17th St. N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 202.857.7098<tel:202.857.7098> and 202.791.1892<tel:202.791.1892> [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> -- Michael Fry Map Editor and Senior Map Librarian National Geographic Society 1145 17th St. N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036 202.857.7098 and 202.791.1892 [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>