My turn to ask a question.

As I mentioned in my review of Kashuba’s Walking with Your Ancestors, I volunteer for a local archive that has a small collection of maps that I should, at some point, catalogue. I’d like to know — if there are any archivists or librarians in the audience — the best way to go about this.

The collection is largely made up of topographical maps a few decades old, as well as some more recent plotter-generated municipal maps, but there are a few outliers and gems, including an insurance atlas from the 1930s. I expect I’ll find more once I start digging through the boxes and drawers that the maps are kept in.

My question is not so much how to store them, but how to describe them: what details, for example, should I include in a listing? Are there accession standards for map cataloguing? Is there software I ought to be using?