The Map Room

A geocache near a bus rapid transit station in Ottawa triggered a bomb scare that led to a four-hour shutdown of a major boulevard last week, CBC News reported on Monday. Police detonated the package, and are asking geocachers to make sure their packages don’t look suspicious; a local geocacher argues that caches should be clearly labelled and in transparent packaging. Via GeoCarta.

Nikolas Schiller points to several t-shirts with map-based designs, including this one; he’s not happy about their likely sweatshop origins, though.

Richard sends along an AP story (on CNN) about online maps for walkers and bikers — it seems that high gas prices are putting people in the mind to think about other forms of transportation, and are noticing that most of our maps and directions are assuming that they will be used by drivers. In addition to mentioning Google Maps’s walking directions, along with a few other initiatives — such as MapQuest’s walking directions sent to cellphones — the article looks at the challenges of shifting from a driver-centric paradigm:

Pedestrians need sidewalks but don’t have to abide by one-way streets. Walkers and bikers can cut through paths or trails not meant for cars, but they must avoid highways. Bikers, unlike walkers, need to think about whether a road is paved and are prohibited from sidewalks in some cities.

All these variables mean the fastest, easiest route for a driver may not be the same as for someone on foot or riding a bike. And developing a comprehensive system for non-drivers requires a tricky step: collecting huge volumes of local metadata and getting them on national databases used by mapping services.

A NASA satellite, the Ocean Surface Topography Mission (OSTM)/Jason-2, primarily measures the height of the ocean surface with a radar altimeter. It also has a sensor to measure atmospheric moisture; this map represents water vapour in the atmosphere measured during the sensor’s first week of operations. Earth Observatory, JPL images.

La Cartoteca links to InterRail’s maps of the European railway network. The maps are PDFs (they’re essentially verso/recto pages of a single-sheet map) and show major network connections and cities.

At the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, until October 12, Revisualizing Westward Expansion: A Century of Conflict, 1800–1900, an exhibition of maps from UTA’s Virginia Garrett Cartographic History Library: “[T]he maps in this exhibition span the century, from Aaron Arrowsmith’s great 1796 map of the United States to a colorful 1902 map showing not only the American West but also territories acquired by the United States in the Spanish-American War of 1898. Among the rarest of these is a large map of Mexico drawn by John H. Robinson, a medical doctor who accompanied explorer Zebulon Pike’s ill-fated western expedition in 1806–1807.” Note the brief item in the Pegasus News (whose headline writer needs to read Lynne Truss).

Web comic xkcd imagines upcoming hurricanes. Via Cartophilia.

The New York Ocean and Great Lakes Atlas, an online atlas of the state’s water resources, was announced yesterday. From the press release: “Currently, more than 200 data sets that contain information on such resources as storm drains, wetland boundaries, underwater vegetation, park locations, and fisheries are available through the atlas. Eventually, more than 900 datasets will be included.” In addition to the usual web-based GIS interface, layers are downloadable in Google Earth, ESRI Shape File and MapInfo formats. Via APB.

Fantasy Cartography is a blog that reprints scans of maps from science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as role-playing and computer games. The archives are quite extensive. Via La Cartoteca.

Marc Merlin describes how to geotag photos on Linux using GPS Visualizer and gpsPhoto; not for people who don’t like to hack with code a bit. Via Using Google Earth.

The Mannahatta Project’s goal “is to reconstruct the ecology of Manhattan when Henry Hudson first sailed by in 1609 and compare it to what we know of the island today. The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted.” Based on a 1782 map of the island that shows its waterways and topographical features, the Project will create a digital model of the island that will be displayed next year, on the 400th anniversary of Hudson’s arrival, in several formats, including an exhibition, a book, and an interactive website. The New Yorker has a brief blurb and slideshow from last year. Via Infonaut.

Rhumb Lines and Map Wars: A Social History of the Mercator Projection
by Mark Monmonier
University of Chicago Press, 2004. Hardcover, 238 pp. ISBN 0-226-53431-6

Rhumb Lines and Map Wars is Mark Monmonier’s response to the controversy over the Mercator projection stirred up by Arno Peters and his map that purported to be fair to all peoples. Rather than retroactively mixing it up with Peters and his chief critic, Arthur Robinson, Monmonier has taken a step or two back to create a broader understanding of Mercator, his projection and its uses.

Most of us with some knowledge of map projections know that Mercator’s intent was to provide a map usable in sea navigation: angles on the map match constant compass lines. Monmonier reveals that Mercator was a little ahead of his time: it took centuries before the technology (such as chronometers) was developed to make his map one of several essential navigation tools. From the development of sailing charts to the development of Mercator variants such as the transverse and space oblique, Monmonier not only demonstrates the Mercator’s specific uses, but also that the projection was the result of divers hands. Mercator himself rates only a chapter; the map cannot be reduced to the mapmaker.

The source of the controversy over the Mercator projection was its use as a wall map; the Mercator’s dominance began during the 19th century, when ships were king. But by the 20th century its influence was beginning to wane. Other projections began making their appearance in atlases, such as Goode’s homolosine and the Mollweide. National Geographic had been using the compromise Van der Grinten projection on its wall maps since 1922. And, with the advent of aviation and beacon-based navigation, great circles became more important than rhumb lines.

Peters’s attack on the Mercator projection in the 1970s seems a bit odd in this context, which I think is Monmonier’s point. Apart from honking off academic cartographers, Peters proferred a solution that was hardly novel — there are plenty of equal-area equatorial projections out there, which differ only in their secants. But he was able to engage the imaginations of a number of organizations who were receptive to his post-colonial critique.

Monmonier finishes by questioning whether scholars exaggerate the influence of the Mercator projection on social thought: “Did Europe’s rulers and merchants need wall maps or world atlases to justify their actions? Did maps that inflated the size of the British Empire stifle whatever remorse nineteenth-century Britons might have had about racism and economic slavery in Africa or India? More to the point, did anyone ever die because of the Mercator projection?” But critics of the Peters projection don’t get off easy: “Although superior projections abound, the evils of the Peters maps are easily exaggerated. Do its users really think Africa looks that way? Do they never look at a globe, or at other maps? Are map users complete idiots?” (pp. 174-75)

Worth reading for Monmonier’s take on the Peters controversy alone, Rhumb Lines is a fine look at an influential, useful and maligned projection.

• Buy Rhumb Lines and Map Wars at Amazon.com

Google has announced walking directions for its online maps: the directions allow you to go the wrong way down one-way streets and appear for distances less than 10 kilometres. Since it’s Google, it’s in beta; there are some interesting hurdles still to be overcome: “[W]e don’t always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there’s actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street. There are still a lot of pedestrian pathways we don’t know about, and they might save you some time if you find them. We’re working on collecting new data on pedestrian pathways and on more effective ways to solicit your feedback, so that we can steadily improve this feature and get you where you need to be as efficiently as possible.”

Update, 7/23: Well, that didn’t take long (via GMM).

Speaking of which, the Virtual Earth evangelist blog also reports on 14.3 terabytes of new imagery for Virtual Earth.

Microsoft’s SQL Server Developer Center is an unusual place for it, but there it is anyway: a primer on map projections entitled Introduction to Spatial Coordinate Systems: Flat Maps for a Round Planet. The summary: “This paper is an introduction to Earth-oriented coordinate systems, projections, models, and mapping. While not specific to any technology, this information provides valuable background for those who will use spatial data in SQL Server.” It is easily applicable outside that context as well. Via Virtual Earth, an Evangelist’s Blog.

As reported last year, the provincial government of British Columbia is making its geographic databases available online and via Google Earth. The announcement was made last Friday; the Vancouver Sun has coverage. Via, and more at, AnyGeo.

Satbeams displays satellite coverage maps — i.e., where on the world signals can be received from a given satellite — in a Google Maps context. Neat, comprehensive, and fascinating to look at. Via Mapperz and Ogle Earth.

An 18-year-old driver was able to beat a speeding ticket by using data from a vehicle-tracking GPS, which, an expert affirmed at trial, was sufficiently accurate enough to disprove a radar gun’s clocking of 62 mph in a 45 mph zone; the device, installed by his parents to monitor his driving, showed he was going the limit. Yahoo News, Hot Hardware. Via Slashdot; thanks also to PK.

“When I stated operating this site in 1997, the most common question I received was related to locating a place on the planet,” writes About.com’s Matt Rosenberg. No more:

Today, site like Google Maps and software like Google Earth have changed the way we find geographic information online. I can’t remember the last time someone emailed me asking for help finding a place. I expect that these people today simply search for the place name themselves. Maybe they start with Google and if the place name was spelled incorrectly, Google provides them with the correct spelling. The search results provide them with a map, images, and an extensive Wikipedia article about the place in question.

I wonder. I’ve gotten a lot of questions asking for maps of a location myself, but it hasn’t occurred to me to pay attention to the kind of trend Matt describes. I still get questions, but they’re more often about a certain kind of map, a map from a certain period, or a specific map being sought. Again, I can’t speak to trends, but I doubt that I have had to field a significant number of queries that could be answered by a Google search since Katrina — and that was a special case.

Are people getting more familiar and comfortable with online mapping?

More good stuff from Modern Mechanix; this time, an item from the April 1930 issue of Popular Science about a combination globe-atlas: it was a globe “with a complete index and gazetteer inside it. Inserted in the globe are two small windows containing magnifying glasses. Inside is a mechanism that reels past this reading glass a fifty-one-foot paper tape bearing place names and descriptions arranged alphabetically.” Why didn’t this catch on?

• The Toronto Star has a map blog, the main content of which is a map of the week feature and which anchors the Star’s online mapping efforts. Thanks to Richard for the link.
• Chris Watson wrote to tell us about his blog about mapping, design and visualization, Visual Think Map, and its accompanying social site on Ning.

In Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, a review of George R. Stewart’s Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States, a 1945 work on place names in the United States. Bill Kauffman’s review “a learned and rollicking act of patriotic toponymy. Its republication, with a graceful introduction by Matt Weiland, is a welcome reminder that the polyglot medley on our maps is, as Mr. Stewart says, ‘a chief glory of our heritage.’” It does sound more opinionated and irreverent than, say, Mark Monmonier’s From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow (review); checking my copy of Monmonier’s book, it looks like Stewart published two more books about place names in the 1970s. Thanks to Richard for the link.

• Buy Names on the Land at Amazon.com
• Buy From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow at Amazon.com

• Facebook app whereyougonnabe? gets an upgrade focusing on integration with other platforms (previously).
• Diana Eid takes a look at map art, focusing on three artists we’ve seen before: Matthew Cusick, Elisabeth Lecourt and Susan Stockwell (via GeoCarta).
• On the Google Earth Blog, Frank has a roundup of innovative computer interfaces being used with Google Earth, which seems to be a favourite test-bed for such interfaces.
• NAVTEQ staff are blogging, but they haven’t quite figured out the difference between a blog and a blog entry (via AnyGeo).
• Strange Maps was profiled by Yahoo Picks last September, but alas, I was distracted by paying work at the time (via MapHist).
• Sean Gillies’s blog, formerly Import Cartography, gets a new name and address and a broader focus.
• U.S. court cases have rendered trap streets obsolete — you can’t copyright a fact — but here’s some more confirmation, if a bit redundant.
• A short excerpt from a deadly rough 1947 educational film on map projections (via Contours).

Another collection of nautical charts for use within Google Earth, this time from Navimatics (KML link). The marine maps cover the coastline of the lower 48, and are derived from NOAA’s Electronic Navigational Charts. Via Ogle Earth and Free Geography Tools.

Previously: Nautical Charts in Google Earth.

Nick Springer writes, “I have just published the Cartography Design Annual #1, a compilation of some of the best designed maps from 2007.” It looks interesting: the volume seems to be based on submissions from the CartoTalk community, which Nick administers; for more information, here’s a post from last April soliciting contributions and this week’s post announcing its availability.

Update: Press release.

“The Small Business Administration relies on an outdated, inaccurate map to maintain its billion dollar HUBZone program that is rife with fraud, according to a government report,” according to the Washington Post’s small business blog:

The report said the map, which is designed to help firms determine if they’re in a HUBZone area, contains areas that are not eligible for the program and excludes some eligible areas because the SBA has not updated the map since August 2006. The outdated map incorrectly includes 50 metropolitan counties that are ineligible and excludes 27 eligible non-metropolitan areas.

“As a result, ineligible small businesses participated in the program and eligible businesses have not been able to participate,” states the report.

Via GeoCarta.

Blurred Out: 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps, a compilation of locations whose aerial imagery has been obscured in Google Earth and Maps. Categories range from government and military facilities to power generation sites; the list includes instances of pushback against Street View as well. Thanks to Paulo for the link.

The Vacationeers, they are at it again:

Via Cartophilia.

Previously: Google Maps Street View Is Right Behind You.

Stefan looks at three GIS and GPS applications for the Mac: GISLook & GISMeta (shapefiles in Cover Flow and Quick Look), GPSInfo (geotagging photos), and GPS2Aperture (ditto).

I have a professional interest, you might say, in the Olympics. The BBC’s Olympics map maps the 2008 Games’s venues in Beijing (and, in a couple of instances, elsewhere in China). The map was built using Virtual Earth and MapCruncher; the BBC’s Olympics blog has a non-technical account of the map’s genesis. Via Mapperz.

Environmental Graffiti reprints a collection of beautiful false-colour Landsat 7 images — 30 in all — first put on display by NASA at the Library of Congress in 2000. Via Andrew Sullivan.

Steve Chilton writes in to remind us of the 44th annual summer school of the Society of Cartographers, which takes place from September 1 to 4 in Aberdeen, Scotland. “Presentations include ones on changing coastlines, 3D panoramas, kayak mapping, and cycle mapping — with presenters including Tom Patterson (U.S. National Parks Service), Ed Parsons (Google), Paul Hardy (ESRI) and Professor Danny Dorling (University of Sheffield). There is a very full programme that includes many interesting topics, workshops and plenty of networking opportunities.”

Previously: Society of Cartographers Summer School 2007.

Lost States: Real Quests for American Statehood
by Michael J. Trinklein
CreateSpace, 2008. Softcover, 95 pp. ISBN-13 978-1438215334

Lost States: Real Quests for American Statehood chronicles 42 proposals for U.S. statehood that never went anywhere (though some very nearly did). I had no idea there were so many of them. They range from the nutty to the serious, from the Revolution to recently, and from the Atlantic (Iceland?) to the Pacific (the Philippines). They cover the whole gamut: alternative ways of dividing up the territory west of the Thirteen Colonies after the Revolution; partition movements within states (several for Texas and California, but even smaller states like Maine and Alaska — smaller by population, wiseass — have them); new states carved from several adjacent states (a refigured Idaho, statehood for the Navajo nation); more straightforward (and familiar) statehood movements; and annexation proposals.

This self-published little gem is beautifully laid out and engagingly written. Trinklein, a former university professor and PBS documentary maker, brings plenty of funny to the table; his prose is light, entertaining and accessible. While the maps are pretty good (with the boundaries and names superimposed on contemporary maps) the stories behind the proposals are what really make this book: stories of congressmen, adventurers, disgruntled corners of states, and other assorted whackjobs. Really, he should have a blog or something.

As a print-on-demand title, Lost States is a little pricier than regularly published books, I think, but if you’re a fan of the kind of material that appears on Strange Maps, you should grab it. Now.

I received a review copy of this book from the author.

• Buy Lost States at Amazon.com

Oceandots is a collection of NASA satellite and astronaut imagery of the world’s islands and atolls — and not just the tiny, isolated ones like Pitcairn, Clipperton or Tristan da Cunha, either, though they’re certainly well represented and are what you’ll find if you click on the Southern or Atlantic Ocean sections. Excellent as an image resource, with hooks into several mapping platforms. Via Catholicgauze.

Sixty-eight years after the Blitz, there are still thousands of unexploded German bombs littering the British landscape, and they’re still being dug up. Now a map of likely unexploded bomb locations has been released, with locations extrapolated from historical records such as WWII aerial photography and contemporary insurance maps assessing bombing damage. Via Infonaut.

The Virtual Earth evangelist blog announces the imminent release of the 2009 editions of Microsoft’s MapPoint and Streets and Trips, with the former available in September and the latter in October.

An exhibition of Joan Blaeu’s Atlas Maior and other maps held at the University of Amsterdam Library’s Special Collections — and they appear to have quite the Blaeu collection — along with maps by his contemporaries, is now underway and runs until November 23. (The page is in Dutch; at this rate I’m going to have to learn the language rather than rely on Google Translate, with so much cartographic material produced in that language.)

Previously: Blaeu Atlas of Scotland, 1654; Blaeu’s Atlas Maior (1665); Blaeu Notes.

• Buy Atlas Maior at Amazon.com

The University of Oregon team that brought us the Nolli Map of Rome has something new for us: Imago Urbis: Giuseppe Vasi’s Grand Tour of Rome, which links Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome with Vasi’s contemporary etchings of Rome’s architectural landscape. The interface blends the two artists’ work: click the icons on the interactive version of Nolli’s map and see Vasi’s images. From the Web site: “The reciprocity between Vasi’s views and the Nolli map enables one to enter into, and examine Rome in detail, including many neglected corners of the Settecento city. Passing from map to view and from view to map, one can reconstruct 18th century sites that have since changed completely or entirely disappeared.” More from the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard.

Previously: Interactive Nolli Map; Nolli Map Prints For Sale.

Nokia’s acquisition of NAVTEQ is now complete (previously; via Engadget).

A photo of a map drawn in the sand, taken by Stanley Greene, has won second prize in the General News category in the 2008 World Press Photo contest. The poignant map depicts an attack on a village in Darfur in 2003, and was drawn four years later. Via webmapper.

Google Earth Blog has a roundup of the latest imagery updates to Google Earth.

Update, 7/16: Google LatLong post.

“Recently, my artwork has involved mapping in one form or fashion and I thought you might enjoy it,” Flounder Lee writes.

My work titled Self-Organized Mapping was all about mapping my life. I walked and photographed the yard where I grew up (big yard on a farm); it ended up looking like aerial photos which I appreciated. I also “mapped” my internet usage for 3 months, capturing all the images and putting them back down in linear format. Lastly, I showed all of my images from 2000-2005 in grids, each year to a page. I guess this was mapping my journeys, relationships, etc.

The next series I’ve been working on is about mapping the relationships between governments and indigenous tribes. In the first part of the body of work, I looked up treaties in the Library of Congress and mapped them on their actual locations. I would follow the borders and photograph at preset distances. The work was then put back down over the original map in a grid format (which I guess is becoming my thing at this point).

(Links added.)

Television stations routinely make cartographic errors in their graphics, but I bet none have backfired quite like this. An Indian television program’s logo erroneously showed Nepal as part of India; Nepal was not pleased. Via GeoCarta.

Reader’s Digest organized a race from one end of Britain to the other, with each of three teams using a different means of navigation. The Scotsman reports on the results: “The race was won by a team relying on road signs and locals’ advice, followed by another using road maps. The satnav-guided car came last. … The satnav-guided car finished one-and-a-half hours behind the map car -– driven by women –- which itself came in half an hour behind the winning signs-and-directions-led vehicle –- driven by men.” As you might expect, the article covers some of the more risible directions the GPS navigation system came up with. Via All Points Blog.

I’ll have more to say about location-aware iPhone applications once I’ve installed the 2.0 software update on my iPod touch and played with a couple of them. I won’t be able to say anything about the GPS on the iPhone 3G — with Rogers’s usurious rates in Canada, I won’t be getting one — but Engadget’s review of the iPhone 3G discusses the new phone’s GPS features, especially whether the iPhone can replace a car-based navigation system:

We were able to acquire GPS in as little as a second or two, although depending on your location and reception, you might see that take longer. It’s important to note, though, that the iPhone’s was clearly intended to be a location-aware smartphone — not a dedicated GPS device. There’s a big difference.

That said, there’s an enormous amount of interest by people hoping they can add one more to the pile of devices their iPhone has taken over for. It’s pretty clear why people might want the iPhone 3G to replace their car’s dedicated GPS nav, too. It’s not just a location-aware device with a large, bright screen — it’s also connected (with service you’re already paying for), thus able to get traffic updates, routing information, and so on. The Google Maps app doesn’t provide turn by turn route guidance, though, so while it does provide directions, you can only use it as a stand-in — and not as a full replacement — for a proper GPS device. This problem might be solved later by some intrepid 3rd party developer (like, say, TomTom or Telenav), but there’s been some confusion as to whether this might actually happen, and what Apple’s official stance on GPS nav actually is. And even if this GPS software does eventually come out, the speaker on the iPhone 3G simply won’t be loud enough to be heard over most road noise, so you’d also have to make use of a line-out. In other words, don’t sell your GPS device just yet, okay?

The review also has a couple of tidbits on Google Maps, EXIF data, and application permissions.

A Most Dangerous Voyage: An Exhibition of Books and Maps Documenting Four Centuries of Exploration in Search of a Northwest Passage takes place at the University of Alberta’s Bruce Peel Special Collections Library until August. The official exhibition page is beyond spare, but John Horrigan posts some details on his blog: “Several polar maps from the William C. Wonders Map Collection augment the exhibition, including two polar projections by Moll and one by Bowen, A 10" Cary globe dated 1845 adds a bit of a nautical touch.” (Link added.) Via MapHist.

Five maps by Frederick de Wit (1630-1706) have been digitally restored: rather than trying to restore the badly damaged originals, the maps were instead digitized and the digital copies were then manipulated. Missing parts were spliced in from other editions where appropriate, for example. A popup viewer allows a comparison between the original and restored maps (click on “Naar de viewer” at the bottom of the page, which is in Dutch). Via MapHist.

This Isn’t England: “So for the last two years I’ve been taking pictures of Britain on world maps. Not accurate maps, but drawings or illustrations of maps. The differences are amazing. You might assume that all maps were accurate, or at least accurate-ish. But no, designers play fast and loose with the truth making the host country bigger, more important or more central.” I’m not sure if Ben’s point is that Britain’s size is exaggerated or distorted as a result of deliberate manipulation or as a result of the choice of map projection. Via Kottke.

James is looking forward to two upcoming books on GIS from ESRI Press: Building a GIS (Amazon) and The Business Benefits of GIS: An ROI Approach (Amazon, web site).

John Emerson writes about this poster from Finn Nygaard: “Check out this crazy map from this famous Danish poster designer. I’ve no idea what the point is, but I found it pretty compelling.”

Ralph Rosenbauer writes to point out the upcoming International Conference on Historic Maps and Imagery for Modern Scientific Applications, taking place in Bern, Switzerland from November 28 to 30, 2008. From the web site: “The conference serves as a platform for scientists of various disciplines applying historic maps and/or imagery for their research. Archaeologists who utilizing historic aerial imagery for mapping of surface features, historians working on terrestrial and urbanistic developments as well as geoscientists quantifying landscape evolution from historic maps are cordially invited to present their work. We also call upon scientists from geodesy and informatics to present aims and methods for digitizing and visualization of historic data, as well as anyone else working in related fields.”

• Google Earth Design has been around for more than a year, but I’ve apparently missed it until now; the subject of good map design within Google Earth seems a laudable one.
• Ryan Strynatka writes about his blog, The Fiducial Mark: “It’s basically a geospatial blog about mapping, photogrammetry, and the geospatial industry in general. While I write a bit about commercial packages and the company I work for (Leica/ERDAS), it is in no way a commercially sponsored or affiliated blog (it’s me writing on my own time). In general I like to focus on product mapping techniques (e.g. dodging, terrain production, orthorectification) as well as data collection: airborne sensors and various aspects of data capture.”
• Ctrl-N/journal is “Olivier Ruellet’s writings on cities, mapping, psychogeography and the experience of places.”

This is interesting: a video demonstrating a touchless, holographic interface using Google Earth.

The projection is 2D, not 3D; think of it as a screen projected in midair, not a fully rotatable virtual globe in three dimensions. Via Google Earth Blog.

The History of Cartography in a Nutshell, an astonishing single-paragraph article by Professor Vladimiro Valerio. From the introductory editor’s note: “About five years ago Professor Valerio was asked to prepare a short article on the history of cartography for a multimedia presentation by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza of Florence. He was astounded to learn that his article could only be thirteen lines long, but he nonetheless complied. The following is a translation of that article.” Mind you, there are 22 endnotes, with links to map images. Via MapHist.

More on the Brubaker case: a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Montana outlines the federal case against James L. Brubaker, who pleaded guilty last month to charges of possession and interstate transportation of stolen property. Among the details: 338 books in his possession at his arrest have been confirmed stolen from libraries, of a total of 832 books suspected stolen. Via MapHist.

Previously: Brubaker Pleads Guilty; Montana Man Arrested for WWU Map Thefts; WWU Collection Vandalized.

Off camping for a few days; here are a few links to tide you over:

• Roger Hart’s very good blog, GeoCarta, has moved to a new address and a new platform.
• The Sandusky Library Archives Research Center’s map collection is moving to new map cabinets; I’d be interested in seeing more posts about the Sandusky Library’s map collection in the future (that’s a hint, folks).
• MapQuest Platform 5.3 updates three of MapQuest’s client-side APIs.
• Coming this fall: GIS for Dummies; it was only a matter of time (via APB).
• The European Commission has, in the end, approved Nokia’s takeover of NAVTEQ (press release; via APB and Engadget; previously).

This is interesting: thermal images of London from space, from the air, and from a high vantage point. Part of a site dedicated to thermal imagery of London, but this page is what’s of interest to us. At right, a false-colour thermal image of the English Channel and surrounding land. Thanks to Richard for the link.

The European Digital Archive of Soil Maps collects old soil maps from countries around the world, with a view to preserving them for later conversion into digital format. The archive is absolutely huge: it covers every inhabited continent. Special attention is paid to Africa, with more than 2,000 soil maps are available for that continent. Via Vector One (see also).