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 …
This is a guest post by Kathy Hart, Head of the Research Access and Collection Development Section in the Geography and Map Division. For thematic maps, the map’s margins often contain rich sources of information which supplement the map content. The line separating the map from the information found in its margin is called the …
This is a report and guest post by Giselle Aviles, the 2019 Archaeological Research Associate in the Geography and Map Division on the recent Society of Women Geographers Conference held at the Library of Congress. For women who know no boundaries is the motto of the Society of Woman Geographers (SWG), and it is precisely that …
This is a special Women’s History Month guest post by Giselle Aviles, the 2019 Archaeological Research Associate in the Geography and Map Division. Giselle interviews Dr. Paulette Hasier, the first woman to serve as Chief of the Geography and Map Division since it was founded late in the nineteenth century. On one of my breaks from …
The following post is by Anna Balaguer, a Junior Fellow at the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. This summer, I have the opportunity to participate in the Library of Congress Junior Fellows program, working in the Geography and Map Division. I am working with cartographic specialist Ryan Moore to process the Hauslab-Liechtenstein Map …