Welcome to Office of Coast Survey's Historical Map & Chart Collection

Start your publication search from this page. The publications include Annual Reports, Chart Catalogs, Reports on Special Topics, and much more. They provide context to our Collection.

For example, on this chart we find a triangle and a five-pointed star and are curious about their meaning and want to find more information. We begin by filling in the appropriate search fields.

Because the chart was published in 1902, we want to find related documents from the same time period. We add Year Min : "1890", Year Max : "1910". We also want to limit our search to publications that contain the word; "symbols", so we added Keyword : "Symbols". Next, we review the results by clicking the open link to open the pdf in a new window.

Finally, we search the pdf. If the pdf has been through an optical character recognition program, the text is searchable and we can use the pdf search function. Depending on our browser, this step may be done automatically because your keyword search is passed to the pdf by the URL. If it is not done automatically, press " Ctrl & F " keys together to bring up the search field. As a result of the search, we find the five-pointed star symbol represents a lighted beacon and the triangle symbol represents a beacon that is not lighted.