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Library of Congress Map Collections from 1500's
e03179 writes "A friend of mine stumbled across this
site from the US Library of Congress.
The website allows users to view maps that go all the way back to the 1500's (like
this one
of America in 1562). The maps have been converted to digital form (SID format
- viewer available here)
but are viewable in .GIF form
in your browser. I was able to look up my hometown during 1871 and see the church in which I'm getting married. Who thought the LOC could be so 31337?"
I came across some more old maps the other day, quite a few from the 1500's.
Ladies, form queue here -->
Great site for maps from the present time found here... Includes printable maps, trails, atlas info, etc...
His interests must include using more bandwidth, since that's what he's doing. 99.9% of graphical browsers can do PNG8, so there really is no reason for anyone to use GIF.
And those of using l33t advanced browsers like Mozilla (or Opera) can enjoy PNG24's in their full glory without any crazy hacks (cough*IE*cough).
They probably don't... but these sites do:
http://www.mideastweb.org/palmaps.htm
http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/qpal/pal_maps.htm
http://www.stanford.edu/~bgiddens/maps.htm
Maybe that will help if you're honest with your question and really wanted to know.
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
More info.
Works on Mozilla 1.2b in Windows with no download of this plugin. Don't know if it ships with mozilla or I got it from somewhere else (WMP 7, & QT6 are installed too, maybe it came from there).
I found this page the other week (while trying to settle an argument over some street names) and I found you can get the entire full-resolution maps in gif - with a little hackery. Go to a map and set it at the smallest zoom. Now look at the image location - yep, it's CGI generated and right in the query are the position, width and height. A little trial and error and you can get the entire map out as a single gif.
No, you can't. This is because a tile on one side of a pentagon can be the same colour as a tile on the other side, because they don't touch each other...
Why don't you try it out on a piece of paper...
I found the attitude in this story very odd, considering online map library exhibits have been around many years. What's next, people start discovering LOC's *free* pre-Google answers service?
Get a grip, nerds, librarians are Not What You Think. (draft of a page I made a few months ago especially directed at the slashdot crowd, url published here for the first time ever!). See also a category I build at the ODP, Librarians in Society.
For Win32, Irfanview will view .sid files.
http://www.irfanview.com/
Get the plugins as well as the program.
This is the my current listing of extext and related projects. Some have photographic studies of old text, photos and maps, others are standard text or marked up text.
I appoligize in advance for the format, but I format this correctly it gets rejected as having too few charictors per line.
The Humanities Text Initiative: www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/p/pd-modeng/pd-modeng-idx, The Internet Sacred Text Archive: www.sacred-texts.com/index.htm,
The Bralyn E-text Archive: www.bralyn.net/etext/, The Early Canadiana Online Archive: www.canadiana.org/cgi-bin/ECO/mtq, The Canada
Digital Collection: collections.ic.gc.ca/, The Online Book Page at the U. of Penn.: onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/,
A Celibration of Women Writers project at the U. of Penn.: digital.library.upenn.edu/women/, The Litrix Reading Room archive: www.litrix.com/,
National Library of Canada Online Etexts: collection.nlc-bnc.ca/e-coll-e/inet-loc-e.htm, The Oxford Text Archive United Kingdom Archive: ota.ahds.ac.uk/index.html,
Jennifer L. Armstrong's Free Online Novels archive: www.free-online-novels.com/, The U. of Calgary Online Children's Stories: www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~dkbrown/stories.html,
The Best Children's Literature On The Net project: www.geocities.com/Paris/Jardin/1630/index.html, The Christian Classics Ethereal Library: www.ccel.org/,
The Free Online Inspirational Books Archive: www.inspirationalmedia.com/eBooks.htm, The Internet Christian Library Project: www.iclnet.org/,
The Online Library of Literature: www.literature.org/, Arthur's Classic Novels Archive: members.fortunecity.com/wendover/index.html,
The Bibliomania Archive: www.bibliomania.com/, The Bygosh.com etext archive: bygosh.com/index.html,
The Electronic Literature Foundation: elf.chaoscafe.com/elf_by_Author.htm, The Internet Classics Archive at MIT: classics.mit.edu/,
Project Gutenberg: www.promo.net/pg, The Online Book Initiative: ftp.std.com/OBI,
The Internet Wiretap Project (used to be wiretap.spies.com): wiretap.area.com, The U. of Virginia etext project and sub projects: etext.lib.virginia.edu,
The Chinese Philosophical Etext Archives: angle.web.wesleyan.edu/etext/, The NetLibrary Etext Archive: netlibrary.net,
The johannesen.com collection: www.johannesen.com/OnlineGMD.htm, The Internet Public Library (indexes many other repositories as well): www.ipl.org,
Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts (American & English lit as well as Western philosophy): www.infomotions.com/alex/, The University of Texas at Austin online collection: www.lib.utexas.edu/books/booksut.html,
The English Server (and its various subprojects): eserver.org/fiction/, The Making of America project at the U. of Mich.: moa.umdl.umich.edu/index.html,
The University of Chicago Library (3 collections): www.lib.uchicago.edu/eos/html/ www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/ets/efts/ and www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/ARTFL/newhome/texts/,
The SunSite (UC berkley) collection: sunsite.berkeley.edu/Collections/, The Library Of Congress's various projects: www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html,
The Bartleby collection: www.bartleby.com/, The Bielefeld University Library (Germany): www.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/english/,
The Camelot Project: www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm, The Blake Digital Text Project: virtual.park.uga.edu/wblake/home1.html,
The Schoenberg Project: www.library.upenn.edu/etext/, The Clevland Digital Library: web.ulib.csuohio.edu/SpecColl/cdl/,
The Everglades Digital Library: everglades.fiu.edu/library/index.html, The Historical Text Archive: historicaltextarchive.com/,
The Humanities Text Intitiative (University of Michigan): www.hti.umich.edu/, The University of Virginia etext project and subprojects: etext.virginia.edu/,
The NY Public Library etext project (comming soon): digital.nypl.org/, The Perseus project: www.perseus.tufts.edu/,
The CDC reading library: www.cdc.gov/publications.htm,
The US Army's online libraries: www.adtdl.army.mil/atdls.htm www.dtic.mil/doctrine/ www.libraries.army.mil/ www.tricare.osd.mil/afml/ www.hqda.army.mil/library/ carlisle-www.army.mil/library/,
Marine Corps Publications: www.usmc.mil/marinelink/ind.nsf/publications, The US Air Force e-publishing page: www.e-publishing.af.mil/orgs.asp?type=pubs,
The Thoreau project: www.niulib.niu.edu/thoreau/, The Free Fiction Library: www.free-fiction.com/library/,
The Ancent Greek Literature Project: www.hol.gr/greece/ancwords.htm, The Free Novels Online project at cjb.net: freenovelsonline.cjb.net/,
Well you aren't exactly going to Find the DCL on the map, but U of I is on there as Illinois State Industrial University. Right hand center on the map. The only building on campus at that point is where Beckman is now, at the corner of Wright and University.
Zooming in on a screen size version is nice, but is there a way to get the whole image at full resolution?
Hack the image URL. The position and resolution are right in the query. For example, a 1024x768 detail from the New World map.
(I tell ya, our maps suck these days. No dragons, sea serpants, gods, cherubs... all you get are little icons that show you were the nearest Red Roof Inn is)
I downloaded the sid viewer, linux version, but the menus don't work. I'm able to pull down the menus but not able to click or select the options.
Anyone else having such issues?
narbey
-- "The evil stops here" -Petr
Also, try the Perry-Castañeda Library at UTexas. - a good collection of both
vintage _and_ current interest / events related maps.
Georgia Tech's computer science program grew out of library science. It was the School of Information in 1963, then became the School of Information and Computer Science in 1972. (Now it's the College of Computing.) When I started there they were just phasing out a required library course.