Digimap Ordnance Survey Collection

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Digimap Ordnance Survey® Collection

General

Digimap provides the UK Higher Education community with digital mapping based on selected Ordnance Survey map products, with full coverage of Great Britain for all of those products. Data is also available to download for use in GIS and CAD software.

Digimap, available since 10 January 2000, is free at the point of use for staff and students at subscribing higher and further education institutions and research councils (special conditions apply). Details of how to access the service can be found here.

There are extensive help pages detailing how to use every aspect of the service and the data in your own GIS or CAD software:

Digimap OS Collection Help

The Digimap Blog, YouTube Channel, Facebook Page and Twitter Account all provide additional support for the service.

Data

Digimap Ordnance Survey collection contains maps at scales ranging from 1:1,250 up to 1:750,000 available for making maps online or for download. There are scanned raster maps which are digital versions of Ordnance Survey's paper maps as well as vector maps at a range of scales including OS MasterMap^® the most detailed large scale mapping.

The service includes many other products from Ordnance Survey including postcodes, administrative boundaries, a gazetteer of place names and digital terrain models. For a full list and detailed description see the Products Available page.

Complete coverage of Great Britain is available for all the products listed, except for the Isle of Man, which is not covered by some data products. It is expected that the range of map datasets that are available through Digimap will increase over time.

If you want to know what you can and can't do with the maps and data from Digimap please read the Copyright Terms and Conditions. There is a set of Licence FAQs if you need more clarification about what you intend to do with the maps or data.

Standard tasks

Standard tasks that Digimap allows you to perform are:

selecting your area of interest in Great Britain by zooming and panning
viewing maps at one of thirteen pre-defined scales:
- around 1:7 500 000, using a GB outline map
- around 1:1 500 000, using the Miniscale® data
- around 1:750 000, using the Miniscale® data
- around 1:375 000, using the Miniscale® data
- around 1:189 000, using the Strategi® data
- around 1:95 500, using the Strategi® data
- around 1:47 000, using the Meridian™ and PANORAMA® data
- around 1:38 000, using the OS 1:50,000 Colour Raster data
- around 1:19 000, using the OS 1:50,000 Colour Raster data
- around 1:9500, using the OS 1:25,000 Colour Raster data or OS VectorMap® Local data
- around 1:4700, using the OS 1:10,000 Raster data or OS VectorMap® Local data
- around 1:2500, using the OS MasterMap® Topographic data
- around 1:1250, using the OS MasterMap® Topographic data
printing maps at A4 and A3 size, in either landscape or portrait
annotating maps with symbols, lines, polygons and labels
downloading a PDF print file for printing later

Advanced tasks

In addition to the standard tasks listed above, Digimap allows you to carry out a range of related, advanced tasks.

Download

Data Download and MasterMap Download allow those with more specialist requirements to download map data for use, for example, in GIS software on their own desktop. They allow:

selection of map data product and area to download
data available in various formats depending on which product is selected
data selected using National Grid reference, OS sheet name, place name or from a map

Carto

Digimap Carto allows those with some cartographic experience to carry out a variety of more specialised tasks:

produce a map at a user-specified scale
combine data from different datasets in a single map
print maps at sizes up to A0

Gazetteer

There are various Gazetteer facilities available. These enable users to work with place names:

select by National Grid reference, OS sheet name, county name
select by Feature Type (e.g. town, forest or hill)
download selected records in an ASCII text file

Postcodes and Boundaries

Boundary Download is a facility which allows users to:

download postcodes and their boundaries
download administrative and census boundaries
download Ordnance Survey Grids and National Boundaries

A Postcode Query facility allows users to discover attribute detail relating to individual postcodes, and includes a map of the approximate area covered by that postcode.