Hello Brendan,
Nice work! For the copyright info in your catalog record, all historic USGS topos (prior to 2009) are in the public domain:
https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/are-usgs-topographic-maps-copyrighted
We're in the midst of inventorying our USGS topos as well. Our collection was open and unsupervised for a long time, and since my arrival we've put an end to that. We're curating the collection again, and I'm trying to assess it's completeness and condition.
At the bottom of the USGS Topo Viewer page is a link to CSV files that contain records for every map that was included in their online collection, which contain metadata that drives their website:
https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/
We've used that list as the basis for a database, and we built a Python program that we use for doing the inventory, matching maps we have in hand to a database record:
https://github.com/Brown-University-Library/geodata_map_inventory
It's gone fairly well, but it's a complex workflow given the sheer variety of maps, and we've had to make adjustments along the way: specifically dealing with issues related to changes in the name of quads, the designation of the primary state, and errors with
how map or print years were recorded. We're tracking the anomalies in a spreadsheet and will reconcile them later (and will send our info to the USGS). We're also finding instances where we own maps that the USGS does not have in their TopoViewer (which we'll
eventually scan).
We've finished inventorying the 250k, 100k, and 25k metric series, and are slowly moving through the USGS 24k / AMS 25k (not included in the USGS CSV) / and other scales that predated 24k. The metadata CSV records contain the unique IDs of the quads, so eventually
we were going to join our records to quad shapefiles using those IDs to create some kind of interactive map, where you can click on a cell and get a list of maps we have for that quad. The metadata also contains links to digital versions in the TopoView.
We are not going to catalog individual sheets as there are simply too many, and they have a logical organizational scheme (organized by scale / state / quad name / year). We will probably create one catalog record per series (by scale), with a link to our index
map. Whether you choose to catalog them all or just maintain lists or indexes, I'd recommend using their metadata files as that will save you time.
Best - Frank