A Year in Review: Newly Scanned Maps of 2025

Another year has come and gone with 2026 up ahead! The Geography and Map Division and the Library of Congress have robust digital scan labs that are constantly working to make our collections more digitally accessible. As has become tradition (see previous Year in Review posts), to celebrate the end of a year and to ring in the new, I will take a look back at the maps that were digitized last year which are now available online and choose just a few to share with you!

To start our highlight reel, we scanned four large 18th century wall maps made by Dutch cartographers Renier and Joshua Ottens. The Ottens firm was a prominent map publisher for most of the 18th century in Amsterdam, started by Joachim Ottens in 1711. While Joachim died several years later in 1719, his two sons, Renier and Joshua took over the business in 1726. Most famous for creating made-to-order atlases, they published these four wall maps around 1730. Each map depicts a different part of the world: the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Two of the four maps are shown below, the map of Africa and the Americas. The 10 illustrations on each side of the maps along with the text at the bottom were originally published by Frederik de Wit, a famous 17th century Dutch cartographer. After de Wit’s death in 1706, his wife sold his firm at auction including most of his copperplates. These plates were eventually purchased by the Ottens brothers who added his illustrations and text as the border to their own map. The maps are just over 3 feet by 4.5 feet making them quite impressive to view in person!

Next up is this 18th century hand-drawn map in pen-and-ink and watercolor. It is a conceptual Islamic world map showing the Middle East and Central and South Asia, centered on the Gulf, showing the Kaՙba in Mecca. Persian inscriptions and extensive pictorial imagery highlight numerous mosques, and animals in various regions. The land mass is surrounded by oceans with a European ship at each of the four cardinal compass directions. There are three 3-masted ships flying flags with the Cross of Saint George, and at the south a 2-masted ship with no rectangular flag, all four ships accompanied by rowboats. Inlets are identified as the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Red Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Black Sea with an unidentified body of water in the Far East. Mountain ranges represent the Alps, the Caucasus, and the Himalayas, with a few additional ranges in southern India and elsewhere. The Tigris, Euphrates, and Indus rivers are clearly depicted as are the Ganges valleys. It is certainly a beautiful map!

Moving ahead a couple centuries, this next newly scanned map is an important part of World War II era history. Titled Generalbebauungsplan für die Reichshauptstadt, it is a plan created by Albert Speer to fulfill Adolf Hitler’s vision for the renewal of Berlin. Albert Speer was a German architect and close ally of Hitler. He was commissioned to develop plans to rebuild Berlin as the capital of Hitler’s new world. The plan was centered on a three mile long grand avenue running north to south seen in yellow in the center of the map. Also shown on the map are proposed monuments, buildings, sports facilities, and train stations among others. Demolition began in 1938 and the main East-West Axis was completed by 1939. However, with the advent of World War II, construction came to a halt and most of the proposed plan never came to fruition with the fall of Hitler in 1945.

Other than scanning individual maps, the Geography and Map Division has several large ongoing digitization projects. One of these, as also mentioned in the 2023 Year in Review, is the scanning of maps in our single map title collection. The title collection consists of single sheet maps that were received by the Geography and Map Division before the advent of machine-readable cataloging in 1968, and have been cataloged at a collection level instead of an individual sheet level. The maps are filed by geographic location and constitute the bulk of the single-sheet maps at the Library. In an effort to make these maps more accessible, the title collection maps continue to be scanned and made available online.

You never quite know what you will find browsing through a title collection drawer! As an example of one I found from this last year, the map below is from a drawer of maps depicting Los Angeles County. At the center is a map of Los Angeles County with various towns marked across it. The wheel of text surrounding the map gives you the distance from a given point to another point in the county giving the map quite a unique look.

Our final map in this whirlwind tour is a newly acquired and scanned panoramic map. The Panoramic Map Collection is one of our most popular collections and features more than a thousand beautifully illustrated “bird’s-eye-view” maps of towns and cities across the United States, Canada, and even some internationally. Created in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the panoramic maps offer sweeping historical views of towns and cities big and small. These maps show their locales from above at an oblique angle and are generally not drawn to scale. We are always interested in acquiring panoramic maps not already represented in the collection such as this 1884 map of Juniata, Nebraska. This bird’s eye view was made by Augustus Koch, one of the most prolific cartographers of this type of map in the 19th century, producing over 100 maps in 23 states. Interestingly, this map has a second hand drawn plat map on the back made by an unknown author.

You can explore most of the Library’s birds eye view maps using the application View from Above: Exploring the Panoramic Map Collection, an interactive map that makes browsing and discovering maps in the collection easier and more fun!

While the number of scans last year that went online could fill pages, unfortunately I can only share just a few with you in this post. But as we are continually making new scans available, do some exploring and see what you can find at www.loc.gov/maps!