Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Reference Shelf: Maps - USA, World, Historical

UNC Charlotte satellite map by Yahoo
Satellite view of UNC Charlotte by Yahoo

Maps & Driving Directions: United States...

Google Maps - Fast
Yahoo Maps and Driving Directions
MapQuest - Generates street level maps
Maps On Us - A Map, Route and Yellow Pages service
Topozone - topographical maps of the entire United States.

Compare how these services display the data...
flashearth

Maps & Driving Directions: The World...
Best
CIA World Fact Book - produced annually by the Central Intelligence Agency for the use of US Government officials. Comprehensive, maps, information.
Google Earth - satellite/road/hybrid images of everywhere.
Map Machine - from National Geographic

Library of Congress Country Studies "A continuing series of books prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress under the Country Studies/Area Handbook Program sponsored by the Department of the Army. This online series presently contains studies of 85 countries." Photographs, maps, tables.
More
Cornell University's Geoscience Information System "The Geographic Information System Interactive Map Server, created by the Institute for the Study of the Continents (INSTOC) at Cornell, allows users to view and print out maps showing major geographic features of a region..."
How far is it? Distance Between Cities - This service uses data from the US Census and a supplementary list of cities around the world to find the latitude and longitude of two places, and then calculates the distance between them (as the crow flies). It also provides a map showing the two places, using the Xerox PARC Map Server.
Quick Maps - world maps, flags, blank maps for projects, topical maps.
Map Machine - from National Geographic
Mappy - Excellent multi-lingual site from Wanadoo and France Telecom tempts travellers with detailed European itineraries and town maps. Enter your start and finish point and let Mappy find a route with directions, timings, toll information and even an estimate of petrol used.
Multimap - Australia, Europe, Canada (many other services also included)
Terraserver - from Microsoft - "a huge repository of aerial photographs and satellite images", maps - amazing! You can spend hours on this site.
World Maps Interactive Atlas - type in a place name in any country in the world and it gives you a useful little map.

Commercial Travel Site:
Expedia (travel site) - Maps show location of any place in the world.

Historical and Electronic Map Collections...
David Rumsey Map Collection - 1000s of high resolution images of historic maps. You do need to install a viewer, but it is well worth the few minutes it takes to do this. The viewer functions like that associated with ARTstor.
Library of Congress Map Collections: 1500-2003 - Presents a large variety of old and current maps in easy to use, interactive, digitized versions. This represents only a small fraction of the holdings of the Geography and Map Division of the Library of Congress.
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library
Map Collection A collection of electronic maps from the University of Texas at Austin. The historical maps are beautiful.
Railroad Maps Collection - digitized by the Library of Congress
Regional Information Sources (North Carolina)

NEW: Thematic Maps...
Alert Map - World Disasters in Real Time - with links to details and google earth images. Also for USA, Europe, Hungary.
Concharto - Google Maps in collaboration with Wikipedia - An encyclopedic atlas of history and happenings - dynamic
Worldmapper - areas are resized to show the effects of a given theme, such as deforestation, wealth, population, etc.
• Add your own theme: Outline Maps from About.com - Printable blank and outline maps of countries, continents, and states of the United States. Some are maps on the About.com site and others are links to outside sites with similar maps.

Information about US Cities...
50 States & Capitals - Fun and well worth your time. A good source of factual information about states and cities.
The USA CityLink Project
• Living Conditions--United States--Lists & Rankings, Best Places To Live (2004)
Search on a variety of criteria ( housing costs, weather, etc.) for over 1200 locations.
• See Also: Best Places to Retire (2004)

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