Slashdot Mirror
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 -->
More info.
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.
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/,