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
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