Research Guides: Find Maps: Maps & GIS

Start with specific geographic keywords and move to more general ones, as needed. For example, start with "Boulder" then move to "Boulder County", "Front Range", "Colorado" if the previous term doesn't return enough results.
Add the words "map" or "atlas" to your search.
Consider using a gazetteer to determine if a place you are searching for on a map has historically had a different name.
Use an asterisk(*)to match zero or more characters within a word or at the end of a word. For example, searching for "environment" will return results with the words "environment","environments","environmental", etc.

Mining Maps from Colorado
This collection contains maps of various mines, lodes and claims in Colorado from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. These maps come from a variety of creators, including private publishers and US government agencies.
Boulder Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps (Digital Collection)
You can search for a specific city (keyword search: "[city name] sanborn maps") or browse by doing a title search for "sanborn fire insurance maps colorado." Limit your results to the map format on the left hand side.The collection maps approximately 560 cities, beginning in 1883 and ending in 1937.
Historical Aerial Photos of Colorado
This collection contains aerial photos of Colorado from 1930 to the 1970s taken by the U.S. Forest Service, photographs of agricultural areas for the 1940s to the1960s in Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Elbert, Jefferson, Larimer and Weld Counties, flown by U.S. Department of Agriculture and Landiscor Atlases of the Denver metro region from 1989 to present.

Learn more

These are websites with excellent historical map coverage recommended by the map librarians at CU Boulder. If you are interested in viewing historical maps in our print collections, please email rad@colorado.edu. You can also view and download historical maps of Colorado from our four digital map collections.

Consider using a gazetteer

A gazetteer is a place name dictionary or index used to search the history of a place. This is particularly helpful for learning about places whose names or boundaries have changed over time or for names with variant spellings. If a place name has changed over time, you can incorporate its other names in your search. You can search OneSearch with the name of the country or region you are interested in and the word "gazetteer" or "place names."

Learn more

Geospatial Data Guide

Local Data:

Open Colorado
Open data for municipalities across Colorado. Great starting point for localized data sets.

State Data:

Colorado GeoLibrary
Repository of Geospatial Data pertaining to the State of Colorado and CU Boulder produced/owned data.

National and International data:

Natural Earth data
Natural Earth is a great site for a variety of natural and socio-political datasets such as rivers, roads, boundaries, on a global scale. Includes large scale sets (detailed) and small scale (generalized) data. Natural Earth data is optimized for cartography.
TIGER/line Data
TIGER/line, produced by the U.S. Census, is the go-to source United States features such as state, country, or city level boundaries, roads, rivers, etc. Geodatabase format is recommended.
USGS EarthExplorer Geodata Downloader
Searchable map interface for USGS remote sensing imagery. Here you can access Landsat, ASTER, MODIS, aerial photos, and more.
USDA Geospatial Data Gateway
Includes transportation, hydrography, hydrology, topographic (DRGs), geology, soils, conservation easements, and climate data.
National Hydrography Dataset
Users can download the national hydrography data using the data viewer (map interface) or by region or state. Data available in geodatabase or shapefile format.