This is a guest post by Iris Taylor, a senior cataloging specialist in the Geography and Map Division. It is a common belief that you can acquire inspiration from a variety of people, places, or things. Seanna Tsung, a Library of Congress staff member, recently uncovered a unique collection of maps in the Geography and …
This is a guest post by Britt Long, Detailed Reference Librarian in the Geography and Map Division. Since the founding of the United States of America, our country has been in the import and export business. We have bartered and traded goods across land and sea, developing systems of transportation that are both innovative and …
This is a guest post by Robert Morris, Acquisitions Specialist in the Geography and Map Division. The Geography and Map Division’s (G&M) collection of panoramic maps portray U.S. and Canadian cities and towns as if viewed from a few thousand feet above at an oblique angle. Bird’s-eye views, perspective maps, and aerial views are other …
This is a guest post by Kelly Bilz, Librarian-in-Residence in the Geography and Map Division. From Jules Verne’s novel (the title of which I borrowed for this blog) to the 1956 movie The Mole People, many have wondered what happens under the surface of the Earth. And many people, from scientists to storytellers, have come up with …
This is a guest post by Kelly Bilz, Librarian-in-Residence in the Geography and Map Division. Beneath the surface of west-central Kentucky winds a complex system of rivers and grottos known as Mammoth Cave. Named “mammoth” for its size, the cave doesn’t have much to do with the creature—although mammoths and mastodons did live in Kentucky near Big …
This is a guest post by Kelly Bilz, Librarian-in-Residence in the Geography and Map Division. If you’re buying a souvenir map, would you rather it be “historical,” or “hysterical”? The Lindgren Brothers aimed for the latter in their set of maps of American landmarks. With their distinct style—a yellow background, a blue (or sometimes red) border, and …
This is a guest post by Kelly Bilz, Librarian-in-Residence in the Geography and Map Division. Even though Latin had fallen out of vernacular use after the fall of Rome (and began to evolve into the modern Romance languages), it lived on in its written form, becoming the lingua franca, so to speak, of scholarship. In …
This is a guest post by Rachel Trent, Digital Collections and Automation Coordinator in the Geography and Map Division. Interested in bulk downloading maps from the Library of Congress’s online collections? Need a corpus of historical map images to build a training dataset for your machine learning model? Looking to learn more about Python or APIs? Curious …
This is a guest post by Kathy Hart, Head of the Research Access and Collection Development Section in the Geography and Map Division. Libraries and museums often feature maps and related geographic content in digital and analog, large or small exhibits, displays and workshops. When considering the variety of materials available, how does one select …
