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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?"
you are a pirate lost in time
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
These maps aren't very good for directions. For example, the entire state of California is missing, and the United States isn't even recognizable. They may be fine for getting around Europe, but for use in the Americas, well, they're worthless.
So could you please tell me if they included a map for Palestine and Israel so we can settle this once and for all ?
I guess the hadn't discovered more then 256 colors in the 1500's
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Who thought the LOC could be so 31337?"
Actually, librarians were one of the earlier professions outside of the hard sciences to "get" computers.
I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve. BB
I hope they respect the copyrights on those documents! Remember, sharing is stealing!
I don't understand the constant hypocracy taking place at slashdot. When asking taco why he uses .GIFs for all of the graphics on slashdot, as the majority of the ./ crowd favors PNGs over GIFs for numerous reasons, he told me not to confuse HIS interests with the interests of the readers. Hmmph
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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...
This must be where MapQuest does all their data mining.... I always wondered why it told me to take so many non-existent roads..
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
My University has vanished! I found a map of Champaign, IL (I go to the U of I there...) ca. 1869 (2 years after the University was supposedly founded) and there's nothing there! The map shows farmland where all of the University buildings are! So, the question is, did the U of I really exist then, or are they just pulling my leg? I want answers!
Surely you jest. LIbraries are the oldest and ultimate repository of geek-ness. WHat could be more 31337.
Interestingly, the world's first library just reopened a couple of days ago.
Or you could visit this extraordinary place.
Think back to SnowCrash, that piece of geek required reading...
(for the uninitiated, the Protagonist of SnowCrash is a uber-hacker of sorts who freelances doing data mining for the library of congress. He also delivers pizza for the Mafia, or did until he crashed his car.)
Yeah, I noticed that all those dragons that used to be in the middle of the Atlantic are nowhere near there anymore.
A man's reach must exceed his grasp, or what's an erection for?
That's what happens when you hunt animals to the point of extinction.
These maps aren't very good for directions. For example, the entire state of California is missing, and the United States isn't even recognizable.
I guess you must have missed the disclaimer: "When using this map, it's a good idea to do a reality check and make sure the road still exists, watch out for construction, and follow all traffic safety precautions. This map is only to be used as an aid in planning."
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Size of Slashdot's logo (title.gif): 3473 bytes
Size of Slashdot's logo as a PNG: 2558 bytes
Savings of 915 bytes
That's a savings of nearly a gig per million downloads. Imagine the savings when you do all the other graphics on the site, too.
I love old maps on weekends; by day, I love modern spatial datasets at the large earth-science agency at which I work (OK, it's a part of the Dept. of Injustice as referenced in a recent /. article on the 100% M$ solution. My team is about 50% Mac, 40% Win, 10% *nix - but that's OT).
Maps can be considered a superset of the relational/OO database; x, y, z and t have special properties (try indexing on x and y). If you'd like to learn more of this facinating topic, do the usual searches but be sure to include GIS (geographic information system, not guessing is simpler, as some have suggested).
Cheers from a first-poster. /. is great!
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/,
I have a few maps of my hometown that predate the oldest LOC maps of the area (mine are from early 1800s). Does anyone know of a method to submit maps for archival? (I don't really want to give them away, but I would like to see them digitally archived)
"player 4 hit player 1 with 0 stroms"
The maps are digitized from their original, hard-copy form. That produces a raster image, and it would be entirely useless to attempt to make an inaccurate vector represenetation of it.
Hmmm; the maps of Boston seem just about as good for getting around here as any I've seen at a bookstore recently....
no duh. You know what else is patented? Try the way your cursor goes to the next line when you hit return - seriously
Let me know you need help burning your return key.