I’ve decided to finally organize my orienteering map collections. I used to religiously put all my race maps in map books but many have fallen apart and I stopped this practice in 2001’ish. So many of the maps are still well organized and the others need organization in new map books or i could scan them and put them in my seldomly used digital orienteering map archive.
Pros and cons for each?
What do people suggest?
For non race maps I plan to just scan them and then donate the hard copies to my Uni map library (they have about two hundred O maps already)
I have all of mine in folders sorted by year, I only keep major events and out of town training maps. I find having the physical copies are great for doing any sort of map study, on a screen I have a hard time getting into the map either because of the size of the screen, different colours, zoom level, etc. Feels more natural because that’s what you actually orienteer with. Plus the amount of dirt stained onto the map is a nice reminder of how fun that race was :)
Currently my collection only goes back 10 years so it’s still fairly easy to find what I’m looking for. And cataloging them is quite easy, I’d imagine I would get tired of scanning maps after every race pretty quick.
I don't understand the question...;-). I have map binders, used to be one for each year of competitive orienteering but 42 binders take a lot of space (only con) so some binders have more than one year. Taking out a map from a binder to look at, to study or just to become nostalgic about can't be replaced by any screen version for the reasons Rhombus mention above.
within the first two hours i agree that nothing beats the physical map. i think it will be easier to organize the years i haven’t kept up with in folders than to scan them.
Most of my race maps are in hanging folders in a two-drawer filing cabinet sorted by geographical area (which mostly means states, though a few states have multiple folders and some rarely-visited states are combined, and there's also Canada, Nordic, and Europe). I've also got a large format five drawer cabinet that some maps are in. Non race maps for the most part get tossed out. Then I have a spreadsheet that has all the races listed.
Mine are piled up in plastic drawers, sorted by location. Most have the date on them somewhere unless I don't know it. (I'll write it on the back of the map if it's not on the clue sheet or already stamped/printed somewhere.) I also usually have a pile of the last 1-3 years on my desk which eventually needs to be sorted.
My almost 30 years of orienteering fits into 4 roughly 15"x12"x9" drawers, which then are stashed up out of the way on top of some tall furniture.
I checked my spreadsheet: out of 1575 races, I think I'm missing 14 maps.
I'm not sure I would recommend this to anyone else but I have some 50 three-ring binders - all but one are red - ranging in size from 1" to 3" rings. The busier the years the larger the rings. !969 -71 (few events due to other sports) and 2020-21 (few events due to Covid) go in one binder each. 2009 gets two binders with one for a special trip to Australia (the not-red one). The rest are one year: one binder.
Many of the yearbooks are decorated with stickers from special events and in many cases photos and news clippings are added to the pages. No one else ever is interested enough to look at my collection but every once in a while....I go there. For instance some years ago AP had a discussion about Bastrop State Park and the large fire there. I was able to pull out my maps from a two-day event there back in '95. Great memory.
Then in the last few years I had been pulling out maps of the Ottawa area from 50 years earlier and trying to re-run the courses. Trying because in half a century even the map of a protected park wil change a lot and ... the body inside my skin is not what it used to be.
I don't think "By location" would work for me unless I had binders that could expand infinitely. I store "By date" and make sure name the area / map in my Attackpoint log. Then maps are easy to find.
DOMA is in fact the only sane solution! I have run up to 105 sanctioned events in a year, more normally 75-80 (30-50 when I was younger and we didn't have street-O or Night-O in winter), and I have been orienteering for 55 years now.
After several moves with boxes full of binders I decided that I'd never get around to scanning them all, so if I'm feeling really nostalgic I'll take a look at the DOMA maps from Trond Rønneberg (we're both born in 1957) or maybe Lars Lönnqvist. :-)
I don't think "By location" would work for me unless I had binders that could expand infinitely.
That's why some places have multiple folders. In a couple of cases there's a separate folder for one particular map.
Let me guess: Pawtuckaway and Surebridge?
Pawtuckaway and Ratlum Mountain, off the top of my head. Mike's Maze as well, though that one is labelled CMO because I haven't done any other corn mazes. Surebridge is in a folder called Harriman/USMA. Looks like I've had only seven races on Surebridge/Hogencamp, not counting Hudson Highlanders, which are stored separately in the flat cabinet (although maybe there has also been another name under which some subset of Surebridge has been published, I forget).
Speaking of Surebridge are there any WOC 30th anniversary plans for 2023?
Ooh, good idea! There are none that I know of. West Point's long race though will be on the expanded Lake Sebago map, where WOC '93 finished two races.
And we ought to have a Highlander this year. Maybe we could figure a way to use controls on at least three of the WOC maps (might be hard to reach both Surebridge and Jackie Jones).
Eric Kemp and I reran the WOC ‘93 short last year and it was a blast! I’m thinking of hosting a team Canada training camp down there this spring so we might rerun another one of the courses
Filing cabinet for me, organised by state/country and then alphabetically. New Year's Day is traditionally when I sort and file the previous year's maps, although judging by the size of this year's pile I didn't get round to doing it in either of the last two years.
JJ: the same thought occurred to me. Worth trying to make happen.
This discussion thread is closed.