Our services are available to academic and professional staff and PhD students in The Australian National University. At this time we are unable to accept non-ANU requests.

Simply fill in the request form on our website.

We will contact you, usually by email, with a deadline for drafts and any questions we have concerning map content. You will receive draft maps by email. Once you’ve checked them we will send you the final product as high quality tiff or png or jpg files.

• What you would like to show: places, rivers, borders, relief, etc
• the extent the maps should cover (the whole country, a province, a region, etc)
• where you will use the maps: online, in a thesis, book chapter or journal article, in a seminar
• whether you need colour or black and white ("greyscale")
• the final size (publishers will usually give you the size of the text block or page)
• publisher’s requirements.

If you have any examples of what you wish to visualise, and if you have any of your own data, please email or bring those to us. We do have maps, atlases, data and example maps which we can refer to. If you are unsure about your needs or have questions, we can provide advice and make suggestions. A list of place names in a Word document is useful especially if you would like us to use diacritical marks with text.

We have comprehensive geographical and cultural data sets for the world that include, coastlines, roads, rivers, place names, political and administration borders.

We can search for some free online data but we do rely on you to provide data unique to your project.

As soon as you know you need our services. Waiting times apply. For a thesis, ideally we would receive at least four weeks’ notice.

That depends on how complex it is, whether we already have something drawn, how much searching and investigating we need to do, how many changes you request, the end purpose, the final format and our workload. We aim to get the maps to you within four weeks; for seminars and online uses, we have some quicker options, and we do try to accommodate urgent requests where possible.

Yes, please send them to us if you have them. In particular, we like to know final size, map extents and whether colour or black-and-white is needed.

Yes, we can. We can add an Excel spreadsheet to ArcGIS and geographically locate all your points accurately. Please contact us to find our how best to set up your spreadsheet. (We need columns headed “name”, “latitude” and “longitude”, and the coordinates should be in decimal degrees.)

Many different types including the following: thematic, topographic, vegetation, geological, land use, bathymetric, historic, relief, colour or black-and-white, cartograms.

What do you suggest? While it’s nice to have colour and it certainly helps with some types of information, some publications only accept black-and-white maps. For a thesis, we can do either: we often recommend black-and-white to PhD students because those products will be more useful to you after you leave ANU.

Save the tiff or jpeg file to a folder on your computer. Use the Word menus to insert a photo or picture from file. Once it's in your page, right-click on the image and choose Format Picture from the contextual menu. A window appears, giving you a range of options. To resize the map and keep the proportions the same, grab a corner of the map with your mouse, then drag the mouse while at the same time holding down the shift key. If you use the image in the correct way, you will preserve sharpness and resolution. Please don't use screenshots or change the information on the maps - contact us if you see errors.

Our products are provided for use under license CCBYSA - Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. If you use one of our maps in a report or publication, please acknowledge CartoGIS Services as follows:

"Map provided by CartoGIS Services, Scholarly Information Services, The Australian National University."