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Category: Guest Posts

Brown, red, and yellow tinted map illustration of the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, with a circular frame around them

Journey to the Center of the Earth

Posted by: Julie Stoner

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 …

Brown, red, and yellow tinted map illustration of the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, with a circular frame around them

More than a Metaphor: Maps of Mammoth Cave

Posted by: Julie Stoner

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 …

Brown, red, and yellow tinted map illustration of the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, with a circular frame around them

That’s Just Hysterical: The Lindgren Brothers’ Tourist Maps

Posted by: Julie Stoner

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 …

Brown, red, and yellow tinted map illustration of the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, with a circular frame around them

LC Maps for Robots

Posted by: Julie Stoner

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 …

Brown, red, and yellow tinted map illustration of the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia, with a circular frame around them

Beyond the Neat Line: Cartography’s Hidden Dimension

Posted by: Julie Stoner

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 …