The Map Room

The Flickr blog reports that 1.2 million photos were geotagged within the first 24 hours. (That’s half a percent of the total.) That post also talks about some of the behind-the-scenes search technology, admits that the maps (provided by Yahoo!, which owns Flickr) have their shortcomings (especially outside the U.S.), and announces the geo extensions to the Flickr API.

Thomas Hawk has a review (via Scoble).

Frank recommends Picasa and Google Earth for geotagging, and discusses some of the other options, but still likes Flickr’s map interface.

Update: I forgot to mention Richard’s take on Science Library Pad.

Books about Google’s mapping services continue to appear. Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax is a new book about producing web applications using the Google Maps API and your data, whether your data is small and simple or big and complicated. It looks like the book scales upward beyond basic map hacks. The authors have a blog with more information, updates and a sample chapter. Slashdot has a review. Via Google Maps Mania.

• Buy Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax at Amazon.com

Ireland’s Historic Mapping Archive is a new online collection of two 19th-century mapping series from the Irish Ordnance Survey: 1:10,650-scale maps produced between 1837 and 1842, in black and white and colour; and 1:2,500-scale black-and-white maps produced between 1888 and 1913. The drawback is that the maps are not freely available: access costs 5€/day. The Boston Globe covers the site’s launch, looking at the implications for U.S.-based genealogical research (consider the Irish-American population in the Boston area). Via Maps-L; see also Map the Universe.

Map GIS News Blog Etc. Etc. reports that Virtual Earth/Live Local now has geocoding for the U.K., which means that searching for British addresses is now possible.

The Chinese government is going after foreign mapmakers who “illegally survey, gather and publish geographical information on China,” the Xinhua News Agency is reporting (AOL News; Irish Examiner; Shanghai Daily; People’s Daily). It’s not clear to me whether this is solely directed at surveyers gathering information without permission, or at extraterritorial map publishers as well. (Can you use Google Earth in China?) Via MapHist.

The government of Chile is complaining about an Argentine tourist map of the Andean Southern Ice Field, the boundaries of which do not conform to a 1998 border agreement between the two countries’ presidents. The exact nature of the boundary complaint is not specified, but the article notes that the disputed area must be shown as blank (i.e., no border shown) until it’s sorted out. (The two countries have had more than their share of boundary disputes over their southern territories in recent history.)

Edward Tufte has been asked “to take a look at airport runway maps and how runway incursions might be reduced by better maps”; the discussion on his bulletin board makes for interesting reading, particularly in light of the recent accident involving Comair Flight 5191 in Kentucky on Sunday, where the plane tried to take off from the wrong runway. Thanks to Huw for the link.

Cartography has an excellent post about the accuracy of online street maps, made with devastating effectiveness by comparing screenshots of the same location from the different services, most of which, it turns out, are wrong.

When it comes to mapping data, the flow is usually downhill: from the mapping data providers to the companies providing it to the consumers (GPS, online maps). The problem, of course, is that the map data may be wrong or, thanks to the time it takes to traverse the chain, years out of date. Yesterday, though, Tele Atlas announced something that allows us to talk back to the data: a map feedback form called “Map Insight” where we can submit corrections. Which makes the relationship a bit more two-way. In limited release, with similar error reporting forms to be made available through partner sites — presumably this means that the online mapping services will have error reporting forms? Very good if true. Via All Points Blog.

Update, Aug. 30: More from Directions.

The start of a new joint NASA-Forest Service program to provide real-time maps of forest fires has been delayed until next week, CNet reports, which gives us a look at the program, which supplements satellite-based data with sensor data collected by Altair unmanned aircraft — a variant of the military Predator.

See previous entries: EFFIS; Fire!

U.S. government data is ostensibly public domain, but as Jared Benedict, the force behind the Libre Map Project, discovered, you still need to pay for it sometimes. Jared was trying to make USGS 1:24,000 topo maps in DRG format freely available on the Internet. In response to the cost, he bought a hard drive full of the map files and began raising funds to pay for it. Once the $1,600 “ransom” was paid, he announced, the map data would be available on his site and the Internet Archive forever.

It didn’t take long to make his nut: the goal was reached the very next day.

Via (and see more at) Anything Geospatial (follow-up), James Fee and Boing Boing; thanks also to Ben for the tip.

As anticipated, Flickr has launched an in-house geotagging system. It uses a map-based user interface rather than tags applied by one of the many third-party geotagging hacks, and it does so from within the Organizr. There are video tutorials on how to geotag your photos and how to search for geotagged photos.

I’m off to try this out; I hadn’t gotten around to trying any of the geotagging services before I’d heard that this was coming, and I’ve been waiting for it since then. I’ll let you know what happens.

See previous entry: Will Flickr Get In-House Geotagging?

Update, 5:10 PM: Works nicely. I particularly like how it groups nearby photos together as you zoom out — instead of “3” and “5” overlapping one another, you get “8”. A problem for me (in particular) was the lack of high-resolution imagery where I’ve been taking pictures: it’s a lot easier to pinpoint the locations if you can see them clearly.

Update, 6:30 PM: Just noticed that you can click on a popup map image from the sidebar of the photo’s page. Also nice.

M. Krause writes, “I’m starting a small antique map collection and would like to keep track of it on my computer (Macintosh). Is there map collection software available that will keep track of my inventory? I have searched the web to no avail.”

While antique maps are another story, many modern maps have ISBNs or other data; one of the first subjects that cropped up on the Maps and Atlases LibraryThing message board (previously) was how to use LibraryThing — book collection software — to catalogue your maps along with your books. But that won’t help with antique maps.

There is always FileMaker Pro, but then you’re starting from scratch in terms of what fields to create and what data to include. With so many customized data management applications out there, database software like FileMaker and Microsoft Access must seem like overkill, but they will do the trick in a pinch.

What do you think? Or, if you collect maps — what do you use? (Let’s not limit this to the Mac: Windows and Linux solutions welcome too. And if you’re using database software, what fields are you using?)

Tarek Kahlaoui, who is working on a Ph.D. dissertation on Islamic cartography in the 13th to 16th centuries at the University of Pennsylvania, has just started a blog on the subject that will include, over time, a bibliography of the scholarly literature on scholarly cartography (it’s still early: only A has been posted so far). Via MapHist.

See previous entries: Muslim Cartographers; Maps of the Islamic World.

GPS Review: 10 Myths About GPS. Mistaken assumptions and received wisdom from the potential buyer’s/consumer’s perspective.

The Trainspotters of Google Earth is a slideshow from Slate on the phenomenon of Google Earth users finding all sorts of arcane locations and caught images: “As a simulacrum of the Earth, Google Earth provides a safe space for unlimited voyeurism. You have instant access to forbidden or dangerous places … But mostly it’s fun to hop around. Freed from physical constraints, the Google Earther perceives the planet as small, manageable, knowable, and interconnected. This bonhomie can be exhilarating.”

A 15-year-old Oakland high school student has, for a school internship project, created a map of Piedmont, California (a small city of 11,000 people completely surrounded by Oakland) “that shows not only the city’s streets but all its community amenities, such as the dog walk sites, public walkways, Exedra Plaza and city parks,” the Contra Costa Times reports.

Macworld reviews Meander 1.2, a $20 Mac application (it’s nagware) that presents an oblique solution to a common problem: drawing routes on online maps. It works on the premise — one that many of us could confirm anecdotally — that people print out a map and then draw their directions on it, rather than, say, using the APIs to draw the lines within the online mapping service. Meander presents a tranlucent window to position over another application window, such as a web page opened to MapQuest or Google Maps or a scanned image of a topo map. You draw in Meander’s overlay window, and it combines the two windows as a single image for printing or exporting in JPEG format. You can even mark the scale and calculate distances, which differentiates it from simply using a layers-based image editor. A one-trick pony, but that’s some trick.

Columbia University reports the death yesterday of Marie Tharp, an oceanographic cartographer who worked on the first world map of the ocean floor; she also co-discovered the Mid-Atlantic Ridge’s rift valley. She was 86.

A pioneer of modern oceanography, Tharp was the first to map the unseen topography of the ocean floor on a global scale. Her observations became crucial to the eventual acceptance of the theories of plate tectonics and continental drift in the earth sciences. Working with pens, ink and rulers, Tharp drew the underwater details, longitude degree by latitude degree, described by thousands of sonar readings taken by Columbia University researchers and others. Her maps have since become modern scientific and popular icons.

Also reprinted at Columbia News. Via Maps-L.

For more on Tharp, see the page dedicated to her at the Earth Institute at Columbia University’s web site, which includes some of her handiwork. Columbia University, where she was on the faculty from 1948 to 1983, has a page celebrating her life. See also news reports of her awards: the Women Pioneers in Oceanography Award in 1999; the first Lamont-Doherty Heritage Award in 2001. The Library of Congress’s Information Bulletin had an article about her in 2002. And she also has a Wikipedia entry.

Update, August 28: New York Times obituary (via Maps-L).

Update, Sept. 4: Los Angeles Times obituary.

Ask MetaFilter: “I’d like to track my route using a GPS, and in the evenings, overlay that day’s trip on a map. For some reason my Google-fu fails me and I can’t seem to find a straight answer to the question: what is a resonably priced GPS unit that will allow me to record my trip? And as a follow-up: do I need special software to do the ‘map-overlay’ thing?” Definitely Rich’s department: both his blog (where he’s started a series on choosing the best software) and his book (which I reviewed in February).

Alex and James Turnbull of Google Sightseeeing have put together a book that compiles nearly a hundred of their favourite finds. The book will be published in November, under the title of Off the Map in the U.S. and Not in the Guide Book in the U.K. (Update, 4:10 PM: Corrected cover image and publication date information; thanks to James Turnbull for the info.) Via Google Earth Blog.

Meanwhile, Cartography has a review of Jeffrey Murray’s illustrated history of Canadian maps, Terra Nostra: “The book is a short, 192 page salute to the collection as a whole — there is no focusing on the ‘gems’ of the collection. Rather, Murray takes a moderately successful approach to highlighting the holdings of Library and Archives Canada by looking at time periods and trends. … Murray provides a light but interesting sketch of history of mapping in Canada.” See previous entry: Terra Nostra; CCA Conference.

• Buy Off the Map at Amazon.com
• Buy Terra Nostra at Amazon.com
• Buy Terra Nostra at Amazon.ca (it’s cheaper in Canada!)

Lisa Hoffman’s map of the 2006 Burning Man festival is more colourful than last year’s effort; see her previous burning maps — and much more detailed than the official version (PDF). Via All Points Blog.

Update, Aug. 26: Boing Boing hosts another detailed map (3.4-MB PDF) and a number of GPX files for GPS receivers. Less artistic, more practical.

Two maps held at the National Library of Australia for nearly a century have only recently been identified as original 1697 charts by Vlamingh, rather than printed copies, and as such are the oldest maps of Australia in Australian hands, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. (Most maps of Australia of that vintage are held in Europe.) The maps, originally donated in 1911, were identified as originals in 1981 by a visiting Dutch expert, but it was only when the library’s map curator read the expert’s book this year — the book was published in 1985 — that the library realized what it had. Via Map the Universe.

Earth Observatory’s weekly mailing is a good way to discover some of the latest satellite imagery, both true- and false-colour; this past week, there was this startling look at ocean temperatures in the hurricane zone. Yellow and up are above 28°C, and as such conducive to hurricane formation.

Just back from my trip (see previous entry) — I still managed to post a few entries, so you may not have noticed my absence. Back to my regular posting routine shortly.

I like Penn State’s Interactive Album of Map Projections: it’s a truly dynamic tool that redraws a world map (or portion thereof) based on the parameters you give it — including 10 different projections — rather than an interface to a library of static images. You can, for example, set the central meridian and the map’s extent, and for the conical and azimuthal projections there are still more parameters. I had fun trying out the Robinson centred on different parts of the world. Via Cartography.

See previous entry: Java World Maps Projection Page.

Blogs about antique maps, rather than the geospatial industry, are few and far between, but a new blog about antique maps and map collecting, plus the usual gamut of general subjects, started last month, with an eerily similar premise: Map the Universe.

I have always loved maps, especially vintage maps and antique maps. I would like to start to collect antique maps, but I really don’t know where to begin. Map the Universe is a blog that will document what I learn about the world of antique maps and antique map collecting as I go along. More than likely, Map the Universe will also contain more general information on mapping and cartography, as I would also like to increase my general knowledge in mapping.

Sounds like me three years ago. Also by another damn Canadian. Via Cartography.

It’s in Dutch, so I’m likely missing most of the nuances, but this site — De WoonOmgeving — has both 1832 cadastral and 2000 topo maps of the Netherlands available through the same interface; if both are available for a given region, you can toggle between them. The interface is a little dated, though. Via Maps-L.

Rare book and map dealer William Reese is donating $100,000 to Yale University — a donation that the university will match and add to with a fundraising campaign. The money will go towards digitizing and cataloguing Yale’s maps: the eventual end result will be a complete electronic catalogue, but there are benefits in terms of preventing and recovering from map thefts as well. From Kim Martineau’s Hartford Courant article:

By scanning its rarest maps, Yale will have an electronic record of each map, with its unique stains, coloring and creases. If a map is stolen and turns up on the market, Yale then has a picture to compare it to and prove ownership. Digitizing the rarest maps will cut down on the number of people handling the maps while also allowing more people to study them — from a computer.

Making a high-quality digital copy available, rather than the irreplacable original, makes that original that much harder to steal.

For more on Reese, see previous entry: Intact Atlas, Asking 165 Large.

Yahoo! reports that it has added high-resolution satellite imagery for nearly 30 metropolitan areas outside the United States, and upgraded the imagery for U.S. cities as well.

See previous entries: Yahoo! International Satellite Imagery; Yahoo! Maps Satellite Imagery.

The British Library has hired Robert Goldman, an attorney who specializes in art thefts, to represent it in hopes of tracking down the missing maps that Forbes Smiley has not confessed to taking. The Hartford Courant’s Kim Martineau has a profile of the eccentric lawyer:

With a drooping mustache and wire-rimmed glasses, Goldman bears more than a passing resemblance to his swashbuckling hero, [Teddy Roosevelt]. The former prosecutor is the latest character to ride into a map caper that the FBI has spent the last year untangling.

E. Forbes Smiley III, a disgraced map dealer from Martha’s Vineyard, pleaded guilty in June to stealing nearly 100 rare maps. But at least one institution is convinced he took more. The British Library has reached across the Atlantic to Goldman’s law firm in a northern Philadelphia suburb. Goldman will try to shake loose more information before Smiley’s sentencing next month, while the library still has leverage.

Not much about the case itself; everyone’s staying mum until Smiley is sentenced on September 21.

See previous entries: Stolen Maps Meeting Kept Private; Forbes Smiley Case: Another Missing Maps Update; Missing Map Overlap; Yale Issues Statement About Smiley Investigation; Boston Globe on Libraries’ Suspicions About Smiley; Libraries Suspect Smiley in More Map Thefts; Is Forbes Smiley Getting Off Easy?; Three Missing British Maps Still Missing.

This series of maps of European rail networks differs from other railway maps I’ve seen in that they show not only double-tracking, but also electrification (including voltages), which is not something I previously thought significant, or at least significant enough to map, but that’s railfans for you. Most of these are by Boris Chomenko; others are by divers hands. Don’t miss if you like railway maps. Via Maps-L.

If you’re in the Boston area, you might be interested in a presentation by Joseph G. Garver on Tuesday, August 22 at the Hingham Public Library: he’ll be talking about his upcoming book, Surveying the Shore: Historic Maps of Coastal Massachusetts, 1600-1930.

The results of Monday’s meeting between libraries from whom Forbes Smiley stole maps will be kept private, the Harvard Crimson reports, though the article suggests that no actions have been ruled out, including private investigators and a civil suit. Via MapHist (thanks again, Tony).

See previous entry: Forbes Smiley Case: Another Missing Maps Update.

Topographic maps of New Zealand’s Offshore Islands, the Cook Islands and Tokelau are available for download from Land Information New Zealand’s web site. The maps are mostly 1:25,000, with a few 1:50,000, and are large-sized JPEGs, big enough to choke your image editor if you’re not careful. But really nice stuff; Rarotonga at right, only a fraction of its original, 31-megapixel size. Via Maps-L.

A giclée is a high-quality art print made on a special inkjet printer. It’s by no means exclusive to maps, but it’s a term worth remembering. I first learned about it in the context of a MapHist discussion of fakes, forgeries and facsimiles, particularly in reference to an eBay auction of a giclée print that may well have been fraudulent because it listed itself en passant as a giclée without making the implications of that clear. Which is to say that if you’re buying a giclée, you’re buying a digital print: remember that.

More on giclées from the eponymous Wikipedia entry, this history of the form — it’s less than 15 years old — from Startphoto.com, and Mamata Herland’s honours essay (56 pages, 2.1-MB PDF) on the subject.

Via Ubikcan (a blog I really wish I’d found out about sooner) comes word of a relatively new book that sounds like an excellent counterpoint/complement to Seeing Through Maps: The Power of Projections: How Maps Reflect Global Politics and History by Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, a political science professor at Rutgers’s Camden campus. From the publisher: “In this fascinating book, Klinghoffer examines the world perceptions of various civilizations and the ways in which maps have been formulated to serve the agendas of cartographers and their patrons. He analyzes the recent decline of sovereignty, the spread of globalization, the reassertion of ethnic identity, and how these trends affect contemporary mapmaking.”

• Buy The Power of Projections at Amazon.com

I’m on vacation as of tomorrow, and will be for a couple of weeks. As is typical for me, I’ll continue to post new entries as I’m able to do so — it just won’t be at the same frenetic rate it has been these past few months. I’ll be offline for a couple of days here and there as well, so things that need looking after (e-mail, outages, comment spam, advertising requests) will have to wait until I’m in front of a keyboard again.

Meanwhile, I’ve been making a few changes here and there:

The Map Site Directory has been overhauled: it’s now running on Movable Type (rather than being coded by hand), which should make it easier to maintain. It also allows for an RSS feed of new listings; a subscription list in OPML format is on my to-do list. I also pruned some listings: dead sites and inactive blogs — the latter I defined as blogs that haven’t seen a new entry in three months (for example, what the hell happened to GeoCarta?).

The contact page has been redone as well, partly to consolidate three separate contact pages (general, link submission and questions), partly to address the overwhelming spam sent through those pages, and partly to add frequently asked questions and inquiries that I’m trying to discourage.

Also, I’ve moved e-mail subscriptions (see previous entry) to a new subscribe page, and added RSS information there as well.

Other than that, some minor stylistic changes here and there, including a slightly expanded footer.

Chandu Thota reports that he has an article on the Virtual Earth APIs in the September issue of MSDN Magazine: “In this article, I’ll highlight some of the most salient features of the Virtual Earth APIs and show you how to build rich, powerful mapping and local search apps.”

Today’s Vinyard Gazette story about the Forbes Smiley case refers to Monday’s meeting of libraries from whom Smiley stole (see previous entry) but adds little new information; it’s mostly a recap, but does emphasize the penalties Smiley faces next month. However, Tony Campbell has discovered via this article that Yale’s list of stolen maps has been updated since it first went online last month (see previous entry); MapHisters are trying to figure out whether anything’s been added or removed.

Boing Boing links to Los Angeles Mapped, the online version of an exhibition of historical maps of Los Angeles on display through January 2007 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The maps on display are diverse in both subject matter and style: from a railroad system map to a movie-star map to a paper placemat.

But Xeni is even more enamoured with the “obsessively illustrated genius” of Jo Mora’s hyper-detailed 1942 Map of Los Angeles (at right), which you can view in several versions: small, zoomable, and friggin’ huge (4.6 MB).

The British government has decided to scrap the “sensitive sites register,” meaning that about 50 high-security installations will now be able to be mapped on Ordnance Survey maps, The Independent reports; the register was defeated by publicly available information from Internet-based sources. Via Map GIS News Blog Etc. Etc.

Update, 10:15 PM: More in tomorrow’s Guardian (via All Points Blog).

Another Flickr group: Old Maps. Featuring scans of.

See previous entries: Flickr Geotagging Group; Art of the Road; Feel Small Project; Flickr Users’ Map Photos. See also Map Site Directory: Flickr.

Another New York Times graphic about the Israel-Lebanon conflict, this one showing before-and-after satellite imagery of the Haret Hreik neighbourhood of Beirut, home to Hezbollah’s headquarters and, uncoincidentally, the scene of many Israeli bombings. Via La Cartoteca and Very Spatial.

Previous entries on the Israel-Lebanon situation are now grouped in their own category archive.

The folks behind All Points Blog/Directions Media have started podcasting; podcast URL.

QGIS, an open-source, multiplatform GIS application, has a blog by its developers. Via James Fee, who’s been covering QGIS for a while.

For those of us who have our photos on Flickr, geotagging tools that integrate with that photo-hosting service are, of course, of considerable interest (see previous entry). But, given that Yahoo! owns Flickr now and also has a respectable mapping service, one might wonder why Yahoo!/Flickr hasn’t offered an in-house geotagging solution — yet. Today, though, there comes word that such a solution may be in the offing, as two separate Flickr users — Brad77 and James — stumbled across mapping features in Flickr that inadvertently revealed themselves. There’s even a screenshot. Geotagging will apparently be a drag-and-drop affair. More: FlickrCentral; Geobloggers (Rev Dan Catt, who developed the original Geobloggers, now works at Flickr); TechCrunch.

Saved locations come to Google Maps — if you have a Google account, that is. Locations you search for will be automatically saved by default; you can add them manually as well. See also Google Maps Mania.

Vermessen: Kartographie der Tropen (“Between Cancer and Capricorn: The Cartography of the Tropics”) is an exhibition taking place at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin until August 27. The site is in German, but the introduction has been translated into English; a few scans of the images are available on the German pages (under Ausstellung). Via MapHist.

The Harvard Crimson reports on the growing concern that Forbes Smiley may have stolen more maps than he admitted to, and on a meeting of affected map libraries this Monday: “But at least four of those libraries, including the Houghton [Harvard’s Houghton Library], are missing copies of the same maps, raising concern that Smiley may have taken more than he has admitted to stealing from seven libraries over a seven-and-a-half year period in a plea bargain he signed in June.” The meeting will determine which of Smiley’s admitted 97 stolen maps came from which library.

For Harvard coverage, see previous entries: Harvard’s List of Missing Maps; Stolen Harvard Maps to Be Returned in September; Forbes Smiley Case: Harvard Crimson Coverage.

For coverage of librarians’ suspicions, see previous entries: Yale Issues Statement About Smiley Investigation; Boston Globe on Libraries’ Suspicions About Smiley; Libraries Suspect Smiley in More Map Thefts; Is Forbes Smiley Getting Off Easy?; Three Missing British Maps Still Missing.

For coverage of the Forbes Smiley case in general, consult the Map Thefts category archives.

If you have a Flickr account and are interested in geotagging, don’t miss Frank’s roundup on Google Earth Blog: Three Flickr Photo Browsing Tools for Google Earth — the point of which is to allow you to browse geotagged Flickr photos from within Google Earth.

Google Earth Enterprise Blog is a new blog about the top-end version of Google Earth, Google Earth Enterprise. Via Ogle Earth.

If you’re sick of hearing about Google Earth and would like to hear more about NASA World Wind, have I got a blog for you: The Earth Is Square. It’s not dedicated to World Wind per se, but it’s frequently posted about. Via Ogle Earth.

Some Spanish mapping blogs, though I have little to no Spanish and can only barely make out what they’re about: TecnoMaps (via La Cartoteca) and TopoNorte.

I stumbled upon mapgirl’s page on StumbleUpon via the Map GIS News Blog Etc. Etc., which led me to the Maps group at StumbleUpon, which, in turn, led me to The Map Room’s listing on StumbleUpon (thanks, everyone).

Yale University issued the following statement on August 1:

Several recent news stories have mischaracterized Yale University’s views regarding the federal investigation of map thefts by E. Forbes Smiley. Yale is confident that the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office have conducted a thorough investigation of the thefts, and the University is grateful for the extraordinary efforts that the federal authorities have made to recover maps stolen from Yale.

As I reread the stories in question, it’s clear to me that the concerns about the investigation are primarily coming from the British Library, and, secondarily, from Harvard and interested third parties; Yale, because so many of its maps are still missing (see previous entry), is being lumped in with the rest: there’s a difference between saying “we are still missing maps; here’s a list” and “we are still missing maps; we think that guy’s responsible and you guys are letting him off the hook.”

Via MapHist. See previous entries: Boston Globe on Libraries’ Suspicions About Smiley; Libraries Suspect Smiley in More Map Thefts; Is Forbes Smiley Getting Off Easy?; Three Missing British Maps Still Missing.

A follow-up article by Val Ross in today’s Globe and Mail about Library and Archives Canada’s attempt to bid on a copy of a map they already owned ascribes it to a lack of corporate memory and staff knowledge:

“The Forlani in the national archives was a map that was well known,” says Conrad Heidenreich, York University professor emeritus of historical geography. “My sense is that at Library and Archives Canada, there’s no corporate memory. … I had no trouble in the old days working with the archives, because if I had a problem, I could ask Ed [retired maps curator Ed Dahl],” Heidenreich says. “The new people there are technicians. They’re less well informed.”

Location’s another issue, the article says: “Today, staff are faced with a challenge in becoming intimately familiar with the holdings: The map collection is in storage in two places (Gatineau, Que., and Renfrew, Ont.), public service is in a third building, and archivists in a fourth.” (To be fair, the latter two buildings are across the street from one another, and the archivists are transferring to the Gatineau building, but the point holds.)

Via MapHist. See previous entry: I Told Them We Already Got One.

A bit more on geotagging — adding geographic coordinates to digital photos. One the one hand there’s having a GPS-enabled camera; on the other there’s adding latitude and longitude manually. Some options in between the two extremes are emerging which strike me as a little unorthodox: they get the job done, purportedly, but do so in unorthodox ways. One does it by identifying cell towers, the other by matching timestamps.

For example, ZoneTag, a Yahoo! skunkworks project, which is for photos sent to Flickr from cameraphones (specifically, Nokia Series 60 phones at the moment). It adds tags based on the cell phone network the phone is sending from, including the cell tower’s ID; Flickr users can subsequently tag their photos with more location data to identify where that tower is based. It’s a mix of cell-network and user-submitted data to approximate location. Via Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog.

Then there’s the Sony GPS-CS1, a little GPS device that geotags indirectly by using software to match the photo’s timestamp with the location read by the GPS receiver at that instant. Nice if it works. Announced yesterday; available September for about $150. (Does it only work with Sony cameras?) Here’s the press release; also coverage from Engadget, Gizmodo and GPS Review.

Two forthcoming books on the horizon: A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems (Amazon), a terminology guide from ESRI Press (press release); and Google Earth for Dummies, which is self-explanatory (via Google Earth Blog).

Ben has posted an e-mail exchange to the Geowanking mailing list that confirms that, according to a DigitalGlobe representative, “Google has signed an exclusive agreement with us to display our full-resolution imagery on the web,” which means that Google Maps and Earth are the only way to access their sub-10-metre imagery. Ben wrote to the list, “I can imagine why Google did this — to prevent Microsoft, Mapquest etc. from licensing the same imagery in their webmapping frameworks — but the net effect is that ordinary people, NGOs and small companies are also cut off.” Via James Fee and Slashgeo; see also All Points Blog.

Speaking of geographic literacy, David Rayner wrote to tell us about Give Geography Its Place, a grassroots campaign to give geography a higher profile in the UK, and to call it geography, damn it:

We are a group of UK-based geography teachers that feel geography and geographers are both undervalued and to a certain extent ignored by the media in the UK. We have started a grass-roots campaign (“Give Geography its Place” or simply GGiP) to try and raise the profile of geography on tv, in newspapers, on the internet, in advertising and so on. As part of the campaign we have started a petition to show support for what we are doing and we are keen that people from the UK and indeed from across the world join the petition and tell us why they think geography is important and/or why they love geography. One of the key current reasons of course, is that people love maps!

Also see coverage by About.com Geography, Catholicgauze, Ed Parsons and Geography Matters.

Glenn is moving Anything Geospatial back to BlogSpot (see previous entry); if you’re accessing it via anygeo.com (see previous entry) the changeover will be automatic, though you may want to update any RSS subscriptions.

Recent first-year blog anniversaries for, and congratulations to, A Very Spatial Podcast and Google Earth Blog.

Two new blogs to tell you about: My GIS World, where T. J. Martin was blogging last week’s GeoWeb 2006 conference (via Ed and James); and My Wonderful World, the blogging arm of National Geographic’s geographic literacy campaign (see previous entry; via Geography Matters).

Last month Yale issued a list of missing maps; today Harvard has done the same: I have a copy of their list (two pages, 25 KB, PDF file).

See previous entries: Stolen Harvard Maps to Be Returned in September; Forbes Smiley Case: Harvard Crimson Coverage; Forbes Smiley Case: Court Documents; Updates on the Forbes Smiley Case.

Google has received an award for its work — by the Google Earth team and others — during the Hurricane Katrina crisis. Think back to that time and recall how so many people absolutely relied on imagery imported into Google Earth as overlays. (The urgency of those new images, incidentally, taught us a lot about how they’re produced, I think.)

Kim Martineau’s latest article (see previous entry) has been picked up by the wire services, but the Boston Globe has a new article on the matter of whether Forbes Smiley took more maps than he’s confessed to, with, as you might expect, a focus on the missing maps at Boston Public Library and Harvard.

See previous entries: Libraries Suspect Smiley in More Map Thefts; Stolen Harvard Maps to Be Returned in September; Yale’s Missing Maps; Is Forbes Smiley Getting Off Easy?; Forbes Smiley Case: Harvard Crimson Coverage; Three Missing British Maps Still Missing; Forbes Smiley Case: 10 Maps Missing at Boston Library.