The successful georeferencing project Maps in the Crowd – Dutch Indies closed on November 17th with a festive event. Over the last seven months a grand total of 7.000 digitized maps of the Dutch Indies has been georeferenced by the general public. These maps belong to the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). Since July 2014 this heritage collection is part of the Leiden University Libraries.
A large crowd gathered at the University Library to attend our public event celebrating the completion of the georeferencing process. It was with great pleasure that we handed out prizes to our most active volunteers and got to thank them personally for all their hard work!
The meeting kicked off with a general overview of the project by project leaders Martijn Storms and 
Patrick Gouw. After the key-note lecture by dr. Frank Okker (who spoke about ‘super-volunteer’ Gerret Rouffaer, Indonesia explorer and ‘founder’ of the KITLV map collection) there was a lively panel discussion, in which our overall winner Carl Mierop and Heleen Hayes told us more about their experiences with using the Georeferencer. Questions were asked from the audience and a lot of feedback was received that will be taken into account for the next project phases.
During the award ceremony it was great to see many of our 
top contributors, the driving people behind the project, together on stage. Carl Mierop was rewarded with a special gift: the monumental and rare full-colour Atlas of the Netherlands East Indies whilst the runners-up received a reproduction of a KITLV-map of their choice. Before a round of drinks and bites concluded the afternoon curator Martijn Storms showed the attendees several of the original maps that were included in our project.
